Up for Grabs (film)
2004 film directed by Michael Wranovics
Up for Grabs is a 2004 comedic documentary about two men who fought over custody of a baseball. It is based on a real-life incident surrounding a record-setting Barry Bonds home run, where the ball was contested in the property law case of Popov v. Hayashi. It was directed and produced by Michael Wranovics.
Plot
The ball happened to be the one hit by San Francisco Giants slugger Barry Bonds for his record-setting 73rd home run at the end of the 2001 MLB season. When the ball landed in the right-field bleachers at what was then PacBell Park (San Francisco), there was a mad scramble for the precious ball, bodies piled up on the walkway above McCovey Cove. Patrick Hayashi, who stood quietly with a sheepish grin on his face as the scrum continued, eventually held the historic ball up for a TV camera to reveal that he had possession of it. MLB and Giants security grabbed Mr. Hayashi and escorted him down to the bowels of the ballpark and authenticated his baseball as the true #73.
As Hayashi prepared to be the next Bay Area millionaire, a man named Alex Popov, owner of Smart Alec's restaurant in Berkeley, California, was complaining loudly that he had caught the ball on the fly and that Patrick had stolen the ball from him at the bottom of the pile.
“Up for Grabs (film)” enters the record as 2004 film directed by Michael Wranovics. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Grabs, film and directed can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7898037. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2004 and 2001.
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This entry incorporates text from “Up for Grabs (film)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.