The Treasure of “Mr. November”: The Story Behind Jeter’s Home Run and the Ball That Immortalized It
For nearly a quarter of a century, one of the most famous home run balls in baseball history remained in a display case, gathering dust in the closet of Neil Dunleavy’s room. Occasionally, he would take it out and gaze at it with admiration: the golden letters, the black, round smudge where the ball impacted the bat, and the signature that had faded to almost imperceptible to the naked eye, save for a clue: “#2”.
Dunleavy grew up in the suburbs of New York City, but his real education was at Yankee Stadium. His father, John, worked there as a vendor for 57 years. John’s three sons did the same, including Neil, who on October 31, 2001, got in his car and drove the five hours from Georgetown University, where he was a sophomore, to the Bronx.The university had reduced the number of games Dunleavy could attend, but he wasn’t going to miss Game 4 of the 2001 World Series, no matter the upcoming organic chemistry exam. Less than two months after the September 11th terrorist attacks, the New York Yankees were trying to win their fourth consecutive World Series, and even if that meant selling programs for $10, Dunleavy simply wanted to be inside the stadium, to soak up the mystique and aura of the place and the moment.
As the clock approached midnight on November 1st, Derek Jeter stood at the plate. Arizona Diamondbacks closer Byung-Hyun Kim was struggling. The Diamondbacks had won two of the first three games and were on the verge of taking a commanding 3-1 series lead, until Tino Martinez ambushed Kim with a home run in the ninth inning that sent the game into extra innings. With two outs in the tenth, Jeter got into an 0-2 hole. He battled – ball, foul, foul, ball, ball, foul – before Kim’s 61st pitch of the game took too much of the outside corner.
Jeter lofted the ball to the opposite field. It kept going and went over the fence just to the left of the 314-foot marker, below the right-field foul pole, where Dunleavy was standing. While a man to his right tumbled over the railing and those to his left jumped for joy, Dunleavy pounced on the ball, securing it with his right arm amidst the chaos.
The ball is a time machine that returns to the golden age of the Yankees, the last great baseball dynasty, and more than that, a relic of “The Captain’s” career. For all the indelible moments of his career – the Jeffrey Maier home run, the dive into the stands, the home run of hit number 3,000, the flip – the ball that gave Jeter the nickname “Mr. November” is perhaps the most iconic, a fact that Dunleavy gladly shares with his three children.
“If someone mentions it,” Dunleavy said, “they say, ‘Oh, that’s the ball Dad cares so much about.'”
Neil Dunleavy
Dunleavy had never spoken publicly about the ball and how it came into his possession. However, in recent months, he decided to sell it, and with the auction ending on June 14, he spoke about that magical night, and how although he will no longer have the physical memory of it, he will always have something even more valuable.
“I’m selling the ball,” Dunleavy said. “I’m not selling the story.”
Neil Dunleavy
When he arrived at Yankee Stadium on Halloween night, Dunleavy thought he would spend the night at a merchandise stand with his father and brothers, selling caps and pennants and their best-selling item, jerseys with Jeter’s number 2 on the back. However, the Yankees needed someone to sell programs that night, and as he was the youngest, Dunleavy got the short end of the stick.
Selling programs wasn’t the worst task. They cost $10, which meant Dunleavy wouldn’t have to deal with change or prepare an item like the hot dog vendors. The programs were a high-volume business. He knew cool people – Dunleavy said he gave programs to Adam Sandler and John Travolta for free – and delivered to hundreds of people souvenirs of what he hoped would be a memorable night.
But by the tenth inning, Dunleavy was exhausted. He had walked miles around the stadium carrying stacks of programs. He knew Jeter was up to bat and asked a nearby security guard if he could park at the front of the right field stands and count his money, in case the game ended there.
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if he hit a home run right now for us?” Dunleavy asked the security guard.
Neil Dunleavy
Dunleavy knew how Jeter operated. At 27, Jeter had already cemented his legacy with four World Series victories. His inside-out swing had won them many games, including Game 1 of the 1996 American League Championship Series, when 12-year-old fan Jeffrey Maier knocked a ball over the right field fence for a tying home run in the days before replay review. The Yankees won their first World Series in nearly two decades.
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 drifted toward the corner, right where Dunleavy was standing. He played baseball in high school and is sure he would have caught the ball if it weren’t for the wads of money in his hands. It bounced to his left and ricocheted in front of Dunleavy. He dropped the money and went for a different kind of treasure.“I’m in the corner of right field, and I obviously know the history of the Yankees,” Dunleavy said. “I know Jeffrey Maier, and I know why the guard next to me is there in the first place: to prevent incidents like the Jeffrey Maier one from happening.”
Neil Dunleavy
He landed hard on the ball, bruising his ribs. He clutched it tightly while others lunged at him hoping he would let go. The man who had inverted himself over the barricade, Jimmy Brunn, said: “He came straight at me. My fingers were on it. And he pulled it away. There were about 50 people on top of us.”
When the stack retreated, Dunleavy stood up, looked around, and panicked. Not a single dollar was left on the ground. Maybe the ball would be worth more than the money he had earned that night, but his first thought was: “My father is going to kill me.” Then, Dunleavy’s eyes turned to a security guard, who, he said, had “a wad of crumpled 20 and 10 dollar bills the size of a football.” When he counted the money, the $2,120 in programs he had sold were accounted for.
Dunleavy celebrated by climbing onto a security guard’s chair and holding the ball in the air, to the delight of the fans who were still euphoric about the victory, 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’ve told 5,000 people I have a very famous ball. I better get out of here.'”
Neil Dunleavy
On the way back to his father’s post, Dunleavy began to think 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 to Yankees fans. This was Dunleavy’s opportunity to reward 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 I hope he appreciates it.”
Neil Dunleavy
He returned to Yankee Stadium early the next day, with the ball in hand, and went to right field, where he posed for a photo with the ball. “I thought I was going to give the ball away forever, that I would never see it again,” Dunleavy said. He met with Joe Lee, a ball boy he knew, and asked him to take the ball to Jeter. He hoped Jeter would come out of the locker room, 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 mark. It was Mr. November’s ball, only with a faint signature, the date (“11-1-01”) and the number 2.“If I had known they were going to give it back to me,” Dunleavy said, “I would have given him a better pen.”
Neil Dunleavy
Dunleavy returned to Georgetown and recounted to his friends the story of Mr. November’s ball. It became a recurring story at parties. His future wife, Annemarie, learned about the ball within the first 30 minutes of meeting Dunleavy.
The ball stayed at his parents’ house while he finished his university studies and remained there during his time in medical school. When Dunleavy moved to his own apartment during his residency in New York City, it joined him. It went to Chicago when work took him there and finally back to Connecticut, where he settled and today works as an orthopedic surgeon specializing in knees and shoulders.
Dunleavy, now 43, still loves the Yankees and baseball. It taught him to do math, provided him with hours of entertainment reviewing Beckett Baseball Card Monthly magazine, filled his early adulthood with memories of his father and his brothers.
“It just hit me,” Dunleavy said. “Time goes by. I thought maybe I’d give it to [my kids] when I was old and gray. One day, my wife and I are at home, looking at this ball. Literally, the case is gathering dust in the closet. We haven’t prominently displayed this in our house because the kids might grab it and throw it in the mud. I’m like, ‘You know, there’s got to be something better I can do with this.'”
Neil Dunleavy
Dunleavy’s daughters are 11 and 9 years old, his son is 5, and he acknowledges that “someday, of course, there’s a chance they’ll say, ‘Why did you do that? We would have wanted it.’ But I don’t think so.” So he contacted the Goldin auction house, which sent him to the authentication company JSA. An analysis with 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 to go, the bid was $110,000. Dunleavy said he plans to donate a portion of the proceeds to Jeter’s Turn 2 Foundation.
Although the Yankees heartbreakingly lost the World Series in 2001, that didn’t diminish the significance of that ball and that moment. The time of 9/11 was devastating, and baseball offered something for the country to rally around. Ten days after the fall of the Twin Towers, Mike Piazza’s home run for the New York Mets brought a touch of normalcy and hope. The Yankees represented the strength of New York and the meaning of the game for the city and the 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.
“I owe a lot to this moment. I’ve always been able to make everyone smile when I tell this story. I can tell this story to people who don’t care about baseball, who don’t care about sports. Nobody can take the story away from me.”“Please tell her that I told this story to my wife and that we are celebrating 17 years of marriage next week,” he said. “That changed my life, you know? And she says she didn’t [convince her to go out with him], but who the hell knows, right? Maybe she did. Maybe she saw my enthusiasm in telling a story and liked it.
Neil Dunleavy
