The votes are in—10 million of them. As a result, Barry Bonds’s 756th home-run ball has been shipped to its final resting place in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York—with an asterisk permanently seared above the Rawlings insignia. It’s all thanks to hip-hop mogul and New Jersey native Marc Ecko, 35, who bought the ball for $752,467 at a Sotheby’s auction on September 15 and ignited a media blitz by placing the ball’s fate in the public’s hands.For the next ten days, people were encouraged to vote on Ecko’s website (vote756.com). The choices: a) Send the ball unaltered to Cooperstown, b) Burn an asterisk into it and then send it to Cooperstown, or c) Banish it to oblivion by blasting it into space.
In the end, 47 percent voted to brand-and-send, 34 percent to bestow it unaltered, and 19 percent to exile it to space. Ecko said he would personally drive it to Cooperstown after using a branding iron to burn the asterisk into the ball—representing the commonly held belief that Bonds broke Hank Aaron’s record with the help of illegal performance-enhancing drugs. As a pop-culture and sports fan, Ecko said, letting the public decide what to do with the history-making baseball just made sense. It’s a shame that it takes a wealthy fan and a public referendum to make a stand that big-league baseball won’t.