baseballOwnership of the ball has been in dispute during the 13 months since pitcher Keith Foulke flipped it to Mientkiewicz, giving Boston a four-game sweep of the St. Louis Cardinals and its first World Series championship in 86 years.
Mientkiewicz, who clutched the ball in his glove and joined teammates in celebration, later put the ball in a safe deposit box and claimed ownership when the Red Sox asked for it.
In January, days after he was traded to the New York Mets, he agreed to lend the ball to the Red Sox for one year. He would get it back "unless the ultimate issue of ownership has been otherwise resolved," the agreement said.
That clause, The Boston Globe reported, led team lawyers to Suffolk Superior Court on Wednesday. The suit asks the court to place the ball in a "secure location" until ownership is decided.
The team's lawyers argue that Mientkiewicz gained possession of the ball only because he was a Red Sox employee, and that the ball is team property.
"From our perspective, it is very important that an artifact with this much history — it was 86 years in the making — be part of the club archive and be available for fans to experience," Lucinda Treat, the team's chief legal officer, told the newspaper.
The Red Sox made quite a splash once they got the ball on Feb. 3, when it was driven to Fenway Park in a Brinks truck. The ball joined the World Series trophy on a tour of Massachusetts cities and towns.
Neither Mientkiewicz nor the players' association were reached for comment, the Globe reported.
When he agreed to lend the ball to the team, Mientkiewicz said: "I want the fans to see it, and that's what both the Red Sox and I agreed on."
At that time, he said it was "very cordial, and we worked something out." He also said he "probably" would get the ball back after a year.
Their agreement said proceeds directly derived from exhibiting the ball would be donated to the Red Sox Foundation, the team's charity organization.
