FOR NEARLY A quarter century, one of the most famous home run balls in baseball history sat on a shelf inside a case in Neil Dunleavy’s bedroom closet gathering dust. Every so often he would retrieve it and gaze with admiration: the gold lettering, the round black smudge where the bat struck it and the signature that had faded to the point that it was imperceptible to the naked eye, save for one clue: “#2.”
Dunleavy grew up on the outskirts of New York City, but he was raised at Yankee Stadium. His father, John, worked there as a vendor for 57 years. All three of John’s sons did the same, including Neil, who on Oct. 31, 2001, hopped in his car and drove the five hours from Georgetown University, where he was a sophomore, to the Bronx.
College had cut into the number of games Dunleavy could work, but he was not going to miss Game 4 of the 2001 World Series, forthcoming organic chemistry test be damned. Less than two months after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the New York Yankees were trying to win their fourth consecutive World Series, and even if it meant selling $10 programs, Dunleavy simply wanted to be inside the stadium, to soak in the mystique and aura of the place and the moment.
As the clock neared midnight on Nov. 1, Derek Jeter stepped to the plate. Arizona Diamondbacks closer Byung-Hyun Kim was laboring. The Diamondbacks had won two of the first three games and were primed to take a commanding 3-1 series lead until Tino Martinez ambushed Kim for a ninth-inning home run that sent the game into extra innings. With two outs in the 10thJeter dug himself an 0-2 hole. He fought — ball, foul, foul, ball, ball, foul — before Kim’s 61st pitch of the game caught too much of the outside corner.
Jeter lofted the ball to the opposite field. It kept carrying and snuck over the fence just to the left of the 314-foot marker under the right-field foul pole, where Dunleavy happened to be standing. As a man to his right flipped over the railing and those to his left jumped with joy, Dunleavy pounced on the ball, securing it with his right arm amid the chaos.
The ball is a time machine to the heyday of the Yankees, baseball’s last great dynasty, and even more than that a relic of the career of The Captain. For all the indelible moments in his career — the Jeffrey Maier home run, the dive into the stands, the 3,000th-hit home run, the flip — the ball that gave Jeter the “Mr. November” nickname is perhaps the most iconic, a fact Dunleavy gladly shares with his three children.
“If someone mentions it,” Dunleavy said, “they’re like, ‘Oh, that’s the ball Daddy cares so much about.'”
Never has Dunleavy spoken publicly about the ball and how he came into its possession. In recent months, though, he decided to sell it, and with the auction ending June 14, he spoke with ESPN about that magical night — and how even if he’ll no longer have the physical memento of it, he’ll forever own something even more valuable.
“I’m selling the ball,” Dunleavy said. “I’m not selling the story.”
WHEN HE ARRIVED at Yankee Stadium on Halloween night, Dunleavy figured he would spend his evening at a merchandise stand with his father and brothers, selling hats and pennants and their best-selling item, shirseys with Jeter’s No. 2 on the back. The Yankees needed someone to peddle programs that night, though, and because he was the youngest, Dunleavy drew the short straw.
Hawking programs wasn’t the worst assignment. They cost $10, which meant Dunleavy wouldn’t need to fumble with change or prepare an item like hot dog vendors. Programs were a high-volume business. He got to meet cool people — Dunleavy said he gave programs to Adam Sandler and John Travolta gratis — and hand hundreds of people keepsakes of what he hoped would be a memorable night.
But by the 10th inning, Dunleavy was gassed. He had walked miles around the stadium lugging reams of programs. He knew Jeter was coming up to bat and asked a nearby security guard if he could park himself in the front of the right-field stands and count his money — just in case the game were to end there.
“Wouldn’t it be awesome if he hit a home run right to us now?” Dunleavy asked the security guard.
Dunleavy knew how Jeter operated. At 27, Jeter already had cemented his legacy with four World Series wins. His inside-out swing had won them plenty of games, including Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series, when 12-year-old fan Jeffrey Maier pulled a ball over the right-field fence for a tying home run in the days before replay review. The Yankees went on to win their first World Series in nearly two decades.
“I’m in the right-field corner, and I know Yankees history, obviously,” Dunleavy said. “I know Jeffrey Maier, and I know why the guard who is standing next to me is there in the first place: to prevent Jeffrey Maier incidents from happening.”
Dunleavy reached into his apron and grabbed hundreds of bills, preparing to organize them, when he heard the crack of the bat. As Arizona right fielder Reggie Sanders tracked the ball, it was fading toward the corner — right at Dunleavy. He played baseball in high school and is certain he would have caught the ball if not for the wads of cash in his hands. It bounced to his left and caromed in front of Dunleavy. He dropped the cash and went for a different type of treasure.
He landed hard on the ball, bruising his ribs. He held it tight as others dove toward him hoping it would squirt free. The man who had gone inverted over the barricade, Jimmy Brunn, said: “It came right to me. My fingers were on it. And he pulled it away. There were about 50 people on top of us.”
When the pile receded, Dunleavy stood up, looked around and panicked. Not a single dollar remained on the ground. Maybe the ball would be worth more than the money he had procured that night, but his first thought was: “My dad’s going to kill me.” Then Dunleavy’s eyes gravitated toward a security guard, who, he said, had “a soccer-ball-sized wad of crumpled-up 20s and 10s.” When he counted the money, all $2,120 worth of programs he had sold was accounted for.
Dunleavy celebrated by standing on a security guard’s chair and holding the ball in the air, much to the delight of the fans still high off the win — including Brunn, who handed Dunleavy his business card and told him he wanted to buy the ball.
“The New York kid in me,” Dunleavy said, “realized, ‘OK, I just told 5,000 people I’ve got a very famous ball already. I better get the hell outta here.'”
On the walk back to his father’s stand, Dunleavy started thinking about what he wanted to do with the ball. He could sell it to Brunn or the highest bidder. He could keep it. Neither seemed right. Jeter had provided so many incredible moments for Yankees fans. This was Dunleavy’s opportunity to repay him.
“We all wanted to be Jeter,” Dunleavy said. “So I’m thinking, he hit it, I’m going to give it to him. And hopefully he’ll appreciate it.”
He returned to Yankee Stadium early the next day, ball in hand, and went to right field, where he posed for a photo with the ball. “I thought I was giving the ball away forever, that I’d never see it again,” Dunleavy said. He met with Joe Lee, a batboy he knew, and asked him to bring the ball to Jeter. He was hopeful that Jeter would emerge from the clubhouse, shake his hand, maybe even give him a signed ball or bat.
Lee returned without Jeter — and with a ball in his hand. Dunleavy noticed the black smudge. It was the Mr. November ball, only emblazoned with a faint signature, date (“11-1-01”) and the No. 2.
“Had I known I was going to get it back,” Dunleavy said, “I would’ve given him a better pen.”
DUNLEAVY RETURNED TO Georgetown and regaled his friends with the tale of the Mr. November ball. It became a go-to story at parties. His future wife, Annemarie, heard about the ball within the first 30 minutes of meeting Dunleavy.
The ball stayed at his parents’ house as he finished undergrad and remained there during his time in medical school. When Dunleavy moved into his own place during his residency in New York City, it joined him. It went to Chicago when work took him there and eventually back to Connecticut, where he settled and today works as an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in knees and shoulders.
Dunleavy, now 43, still loves the Yankees and baseball. It taught him how to do math, provided hours of entertainment pouring through Beckett Baseball Card Monthly, filled his early adulthood with memories of his dad and brothers.
“It just hit me,” Dunleavy said. “Time’s passing. I kind of thought maybe I’d give it to [my children] when I’m old and gray. One day, my wife and I are at home, looking at this ball. Literally the case is collecting dust in the closet. We’ve not, like, featured this prominently in our house because the kids could take it and throw it in the mud. I’m like, ‘You know, there’s got to be something better I can do with this.'”
Dunleavy’s daughters are 11 and 9, his son 5, and he acknowledges that “someday, of course, there is that chance that they’re like, ‘What did you do that for? We would’ve wanted it.’ But I don’t think so.” So he connected with the auction house Goldin, which sent it to the authentication company JSA. An analysis using a video spectral comparator clearly showed Jeter’s signature and the date, even after the ink faded, and the ball was deemed authentic. With a week left, the bidding was up to $110,000. Dunleavy said he plans to donate a portion of the proceeds to Jeter’s Turn 2 Foundation.
Even though the Yankees lost the World Series in heartbreaking fashion in 2001, it did nothing to lessen the meaning of that ball and that moment. The time around Sept. 11 was devastating, and baseball offered something around which the country could coalesce. Ten days after the Twin Towers fell, Mike Piazza’s go-ahead home run for the New York Mets brought a sliver of normalcy and hope. The Yankees represented the strength of New York and the game’s meaning to the city and country.
Those feelings, and not the ball itself, are what endure for Dunleavy, who all these years later wants to thank Jeter for his inadvertent influence on Dunleavy’s life.
“Please tell him I told this story to my wife and we are celebrating 17 years of marriage next week,” he said. “That changed my life, you know? And she says it didn’t [convince her to date him]but who the hell knows, right? Maybe it did. Maybe she saw my enthusiasm in telling a story and liked it.
“I owe this moment a lot. I have always been able to make everybody smile when I tell this story. I can tell this story to people who don’t care about baseball, don’t care about sports. No one can take the story away.”
