Kyle Schwarber video board shot secures place in Cubs lore – Chicago Tribune

The roar began almost immediately when the ball came off Kyle Schwarber’s bat Tuesday night, the fans jumping to their feet in celebration before the ball disappeared somewhere above the right-field video board at Wrigley Field.

Before long, Major League Baseball’s Statcast technology had the metrics on the epic home run. Exit velocity: 112.5 mph. Launch angle: 35 degrees. Max height: 136 feet. Projected hang time: 6.7 seconds. Projected distance: 419 feet. Cubs lead: 6-4 over the Cardinals in the seventh inning of Game 4 of the National League Division Series.

But there was one unanswered question. Where was the ball?

A crowd of 42,411 and millions of TV viewers had no idea, so they assumed it went onto Sheffield Avenue. Players, Cubs President Theo Epstein, the TBS broadcasters and Cubs radio broadcasters Pat Hughes and Ron Coomer all said the ball went over the video board, which seemed like the only possible outcome.

But there was no conclusive evidence that the ball landed on the street, and no one was stepping up to claim the “Schwarbomb.” The TBS cameras didn’t have any close-ups of the shot off Cardinals reliever Kevin Siegrist either.

Video and Twitter photos began to surface Tuesday night of a ball on top of the video board, underneath the small ‘I’ in the Budweiser sign, and the Cubs sent an employee up to confirm it Wednesday through the ball’s special MLB postseason markings. The ball from a homer that produced an insurance run in the Cubs’ first playoff clincher in Wrigley Field history sat on top of the board as a curious memento.

It will stay up there, too, until the postseason run has concluded, a Cubs source said. Wednesday afternoon, after ESPN’s Michael Wilbon was given an exclusive opportunity to hold the cherished sphere outside the media entrance, the Cubs returned it to its original post-homer location on top of the board.

The Cubs tweeted out photos as they put the ball on a stand around 2:15 p.m. and installed a plexiglass case to preserve it from the elements. The Cubs’ social media crew filmed the ball being put on its little pedestal, as a handful of fans watched from below at the corner of Sheffield Avenue and Addison Street, wondering what was going on that would merit the arrival of TV crews and helicopters.

Three Cubs executives walked down Waveland Avenue, marveling at the national attention the Schwarber ball was getting after the story went viral.

A security guard will escort anyone going up to the top of the video board to service it so it won’t be stolen, but there will be no 24-hour security. The Cubs will decide what to do with it after the season, the source said.

They may auction it for charity, though Schwarber likely will be offered the ball he sent into orbit. A Stanley Cup-type tour for fans to take selfies was not ruled out.

MLB, however, won’t give the baseball its official seal of authenticity, according to Michael Posner, who heads the league’s authentication program, which was created in 2001 to correct a memorabilia industry marred by fraudulent goods.

MLB now has 145 authenticators across the country who attend every game in the regular season and postseason to authenticate game-used equipment, from balls to bases to jerseys. In a postseason game like Tuesday’s, three to four authenticators likely were on hand to collect significant items and place tamper-proof holograms on them.

The program, however, has strict rules to ensure consistency. For example, most home run balls hit into the stands are not authenticated, because fans who throw the balls back sometimes switch them out with other balls. The exception comes with milestone balls such as David Ortiz’s 500th home run this season, when MLB introduced marked balls into a game through the umpire to ensure they can identify them.

The kicker with the Schwarber ball, which was in such a rare place that it might have been able to be authenticated, is that the crew left Tuesday night before it was known a ball was on top of the board. Posner said they must authenticate an item the same day it is used.

“If there’s any shadow of a doubt, if there’s any loss in the chain of custody, (we can’t 100 percent guarantee it),” Posner said. “We’re not disputing the authenticity of an item. We’re just saying these are the guidelines we have to maintain a working and reputable program. … It’s not that I don’t trust the Cubs. It’s probably more than very likely that that’s the ball up there.”

Posner did say, though, that postseason baseballs have markings on them that likely helped the Cubs to identify it. He said regular-season balls have blue ink with the MLB batter’s logo, while early playoff games bear silver ink with the postseason logo.

Citizen investigators were the ones who brought the ball to the Cubs’ attention in the first place.

WLS-7 first reported the ball was there after the Game 4 victory, and Tom Comings, an enterprise architect for Tribune Publishing who was taking photos of the board from section 538 in the right field upper-deck corner confirmed it Wednesday.

Comings took shots of the board during the Harry Caray video during the seventh-inning stretch, and then came the Schwarber shot that was heard ’round Wrigleyville.

“Nobody actually saw where it went at first, and then instantly I said, ‘There it is, on top of the scoreboard,’” Comings said. “I put the picture on Twitter, and pictures from the seventh-inning stretch that clearly shows there was no ball up there then. … It had to ricochet perfectly to land there.”

After the game, Comings and a friend of his asked a TBS cameraman if the network had shown where the ball landed, assuming it was captured on TV. The cameraman, who was located in the upper deck behind home plate, zoomed in and told them he couldn’t see the top of the videoboard because his angle was too low.

Comings then went behind the Cubs’ dugout to join the celebration and told an usher about the Schwarber ball.

The usher referred him to the guest relations department.

“We showed them the picture and they got on radio and were verifying it was up there,” he said. “They told me they’d send someone to retrieve it, and then they called us back and gave us some stuff as thanks, a (Jon) Lester bobblehead, a thermos lunch bag and an Ernie Banks pin.”

Later Tuesday evening, sportscaster Mark Giangreco showed a video taken from a WLS-7 chopper. Giangreco said they couldn’t verify whether it was the actual ball, but he knew of no other ball that had been hit that far to right field during a game. The video boards are in the first year of existence.