Grabbing bistory, catching a home run

I agree. I have to agree. For 31 years I've tried and failed to snag my own game ball -- had them carom off my glove only to land in the unsuspecting beer cups of beautiful women who have cooed "what's this!" and watched them sail just a row in front of or behind me.
Home run balls caught by fans have changed the course of World Series runs. They've changed the fates of fans, shifted lives, brought a little joy or a lot of fame to the lucky man or woman with whom they have landed.
To snag one is to have been touched by the hand of the baseball gods. It is the completion of a process that started in a factory in Costa Rica. It is to have watched a ball leave the hand of a pitcher and then the bat of a player and suddenly found its way to you.
"We can do this," Reid says .
"We will do this," I say confidently.
Today will be the day.
The reason anyone can keep a ball at all goes back to the brave act of a man named Reuben Berman.
The details are murky, but according to researchers at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, this much is known: In 1921, at a Giants game at the Polo Grounds in New York, Berman did what few others had even been allowed to do: He held onto a ball that came into the stands.
After refusing security guards' demands to return it, Berman was ejected. He sued and won.
The tide was turning in other ways as well. The dead ball era -- when as few as 10 home runs would be hit at a given stadium in a single season -- was ending. With it came not only more home runs but more seating in the outfield, places where spectators could actually reach them--and now keep them.
Berman's lawsuit and a changing game led to an entirely new connection between player and fan.
"The baseball itself is the object at the center of it all," said Zack Hample, an expert ball chaser who has corralled eight home runs in his life, including Barry Bonds' 724th, and is the author of "How To Snag Major League Baseballs."
"It's like the center of the baseball universe, the ball itself. I think when people get their hands on a ball, they actually have a part of the game."
Berman is the reason that can happen -- why 12-year-old Jeffrey Maier was able to turn what would probably have been an out during the 1996 American League playoffs into a game-tying home run for the Yankees against the Orioles. New York would go on to win that game, the pennant and eventually the World Series.
Berman is why a 21-year-old named Matt Murphy was able to turn Barry Bonds' 756th homer into $752,467. Berman is why any of us have an honest-to-goodness opportunity to tell our own little stories.
"After him there was no going back," said Gabriel Schechter, a research analyst at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
There's something mystical in catching a home run. After Maier caught his ball, it was as if he were blessed by baseball itself. He went on to play high school and college ball, flirt with the notion of being drafted, intern for Peter Gammons and work in various baseball roles.
Even men who work at the hall of fame -- arguably the most sacred baseball ground in the world -- get caught up in memories of their own ill-begotten attempts to snag a ball, and why such things mean so much.
"It's a once in a lifetime experience," said Schechter, before listing with pain in his voice his missed opportunities. "People have waited all their lives and not caught one. It's a sign of a charmed life. To get one is like catching lightning in a bottle."
Which begs the question: Of the hundreds of home run balls sitting in the sanctified museum at which Schechter works, which is the most special?
"Probably the most famous home run ball ever caught by a fan," Schechter said, "was the Maris ball caught by Sal Durante."
Sal Durante answers the phone with the gruff accent of a Staten Islander.
"Hello? Yeah. I'm the guy who caught the home run."
The 67-year-old Durante has told this tale before, a story of fate, true love and how life can change with one simple act, and he's happy to tell it again. It's a good story.
It was the last game of the year in 1961. Roger Maris, with 60 home runs, was one swing away from beating Babe Ruth's all-time single-season record. Durante was 19 years old and in love. He and his girlfriend, Rosemarie, had been talking about marriage. But there wasn't enough money, and nothing was set, and so on a lazy day they headed to the Yankees game.
"I didn't have any money, so I said, 'I need you to pay,'" he remembers with a laugh.
From the other end of a phone, a woman's voice yells out: "And I did pay!"
Durante chuckles.
"We're married now."
But first, the game.
To their surprise, seats were still available. They bought tickets for right field, nabbing two rows of three seats each. Durante, his cousin and his cousin's friend sat in the front row. Rosemarie sat alone behind them.
"After two innings I decided to switch seats with her so she could be with the company," he said.
Here comes fate.
In the fourth inning, Maris swung, the ball launched itself and Durante realized it was coming toward him. Wait. No. It was going to go over him. He stood on his seat, extended his hand -- and caught it.
The force knocked him back and to the ground.
The next thing he knew, two security guards were picking him up. And then a later a guard was taking Durante down to Maris and the media. He was still clutching that ball in his hand when the security guard announced to the throng, "Roger, the kid wants to give you the baseball."
Maris turned. The room seemed to go mute.
"He turns around," Durante remembers, "and says, 'You keep the baseball. Make yourself some money.'"
That ball -- and Maris' kindness -- shifted the course of Durante's life.
A restaurateur named Sam Gordon offered Durante $5,000 for the ball, and Gordon flew him and Maris to California for the exchange. With the money, Durante formally proposed. Rosemarie said yes. Four weeks later they were married. Gordon threw in a free honeymoon. Maris sent a wedding present.
"It helped push the wedding up," Durante said. "By catching the baseball, a little bit of the money, whatever, (it changed things)..."
The ball traded owners over and over, until it made its way from to Cooperstown, where it sits today. Durante remains close with the Maris family, people he respects deeply. He knows, too, that wonderful things can happen--if you're smart and lucky.
"I learned this much," Durante said. "Stretch your hand as much as you can. All I did was reach up as high as I could. Right in the palm of my hand and it didn't hurt or nothing."
We wouldn't have minded any pain if that's what it took.
The sun beat down, and it was oppressively humid, but all we were focused on was a ball lifting toward us. We'd have happily traded a little pain for the prize.
The renovated areas at Kauffman Stadium have greatly increased the frequency with which fans can snag a ball. We waited in the right-field, standing-room only "Pepsi Porch," shoulder-to-shoulder with others like us, many with gloves.
In the first inning, Joe Mauer sent a ball rocketing away from him, sending our hearts racing and our gloves flapping. But a moment later the ball landed in deep center field, far from us, and was caught for an out by the warning track.
A sense of futility sprouted as the innings passed.
"I gotta tell ya," Reid said midway through the game, after no ball had come anywhere near us. "I've been to probably 100 baseball games. And I've never had a home run come close to me."
Nothing in the second inning. Or the third. By the fourth we were drenched in sweat and feeling the onset of sunburns. My glove chafed the inside of my hand. Reid muttered, "I guess the thing about baseball is the lulls--and the one pitch that can change it."
"Yep," I said. "One pitch." I barely believe it.
No such pitch came in the fourth or fifth. Standing there, my hopes slipping, all I could think was: What are the odds?
The odds aren't good.
For the past few years, almost 80 million fans have crammed into America's ballparks per season. Each of those years, there have been just about 5,000 home runs hit. So, even if you step inside a ballpark, there will be only one home run ball for every 16,000 people or so.
And that's assuming the ball doesn't land in a bullpen, drop into a fountain or careen back onto the field. To even have a home run launch itself toward you, a thousands things must take place.
"The way the baseball actually journeys from all the different materials, through the factory, all the steps it takes to reach the major leagues--you're really holding all of those things when you catch it," Hample said. "The equipment manager who rubbed it up, the factory worker who stitched it up and was paid 2 cents salary that whole week, the cowhide covers that get tanned, the yarn, the stitching, just the machine-stamping of the ball. It's a real phenomenon, the object that is the center of all that and the baseball universe."
Then there's the science behind the ball's journey.
"This will be complicated," Alan Nathan said with a laugh. He's a professor of physics at the University of Illinois and an expert on the physics of baseball. "In order to get the ball in the stands the ball has to leave the bat with certain characteristics."
They are:

1. A high batted-ball speed. Of 800 home runs hit this year that Nathan studied, the balls averaged a 102-mph speed as they ricocheted off the bat. That speed is dictated primarily by how hard the batter swings -- 80 percent from swing speed and only 20 percent from how fast the pitcher threw the ball.
"As a rough rule of thumb, for every additional mile per hour of bat speed, the batted ball speed will increase by slightly more," Nathan said. "Every mile per hour of bat speed will make it travel another five or six feet. Every mile per hour of pitch speed is worth maybe a foot difference in how far the ball will travel"
2. The angle at which the ball leaves the bat. The best range is 27 degrees to 33 degrees. The lower the angle, the faster the batted-ball speed needs to be.
"You can look at the characteristics of those home runs and we actually know now much better than we ever did--before it was theoretically--that the optimum is about 30 degrees," Nathan said.
3. Backspin. The force of the backspin works to nullify some of the effects of gravity and keep the ball in the air longer.

These are the transcendent quality of catching a baseball, as well as the mounting reasons why it is so rare: To do so, you have to join in a link touching hundreds of lives, you must beat the odds and the tens of thousands of other people in a major-league ballpark, you must have become an actual part of the game and--finally--you must find yourself at the center of a miracle of physics.
So on that muggy and beautiful day, the ball left Twins pitcher Nick Blackburn's hand in the sixth inning. The Royals' Alberto Callaspo took a beautiful cut, his bat speed most likely topping 100 mph, the contact shooting the ball in the other direction at an angle of most likely near 30 degrees.
The ball lifted. It glinted in the sun. It fell toward us.
I froze. My knees buckled. Reid was gone.
He ran toward the foul pole and the bullpen, his hand out, moving past other rushing fans, working toward the spot, hoping, believing.
The ball fell into the bullpen, where a coach reportedly picked it up. Little boys and grown men -- my friend among them -- shouted for mercy. No ball came.
"You suck!" someone screamed. This did not help. Still no ball came. And yet.
Reid smiled as he walked back to his perch in right field. A little boy high-fived his father. I thought to myself, "It can happen. Someday it will happen." Everyone, having been so close to something so special, looked a little happier, even as the Royals suffer through another depressing summer.
It that moment, simply because a baseball had fallen among us, it seemed true what Hample had said: "It's a real phenomenon, the object that is the center of the baseball universe."
Two innings later, the Twins' Justin Morneau obliged all of us, sending a ball over the fence in right field, sending another promise that some day one of us will go home with a piece of baseball magic.