SAN FRANCISCO — On the eve of a trial that will help one of two men convert baseball history into cold, hard cash, a stadium full of people gathered in San Francisco Sunday night to watch their Giants dodge a playoff-ending bullet at the hands of the visiting Atlanta Braves.

There was no bleacher-bound ball that could possibly stir the masses like the one Giants' slugger Barry Bonds hit on Sunday Oct. 7, 2001, his record 73rd homerun of the year. That line drive ball touched off a minute-long melee in the right field catwalk of Pacific Bell park leaving one man, Patrick Hayashi, with the ball and another, Alex Popov, with a grudge.

Popov and Hayashi are scheduled to meet in court Monday, in their dispute of the ownership of the ball, now estimated at $1 million.

But as fans settle into the same bleacher section a year to the day after that headlining-scuffle, even though there's nothing of that caliber on the docket today, they come to life when Bonds takes the plate in the first inning.

The team could use the influx of energy. Down two games to one in the division series, they're on the cusp of a long off-season of second guessing. Bonds steps up to the plate, takes a pitch, and then smashes a drive to deep left field, where it is caught. For now, forget about the outcome of the game (the Giants will later win by the lopsided score of 8-3). What's more important is Bonds' effect on the stands.

Nowhere is the tension of a Bonds' at-bat more evident than in the right field standing room only section, and in the rest of the right field bleachers. Fans in left field may be known as Barry's Fans because that's where he plays on defense. But right field is the landing pad for his home runs, and consequently the part of the stadium that gets the biggest jolt of anticipation with each of his swings.

It doesn't matter that on this Sunday a home run ball from Bonds wouldn't likely break the $1,000 mark. What's more important is that for those few minutes the $10, standing room only spots on the spit of brick and concrete dividing the blue bay from the green field are the chosen ones. For fans there, Bonds' every swing is like a roll of the dice. Should the ball catch the sweet spot of his black maple bat just right, it might just fly like a laser beam into your hands.

Boaters gather in McCovey cove to fish for home runs.

That feeling, the live-wire-to-the-brain feeling of being chosen, is what Jerry Baral has come to the park to pursue. Here's how it goes: Sometime in between the passage of the ball from the sweet spot of the bat to your outstretched mitt or hand, you get the feeling that it's coming to you—of all the 40,070 fans in the park, it's coming to you, like an airborne shot of adrenaline aimed at your jugular.

Baral, 54, a New Yorker by birth who now works for the cookware manufacturer Williams Sonoma in San Francisco, might have felt the adrenaline at his first game. It was 1956, and he accompanied his father to Ebbets Field to watch Jackie Robinson, who had just broken the color barrier by lacing up a pair of spikes for the Brooklyn Dodgers (Now that was history).

It's a different era now, for many reasons, the least of which is the Dodgers' 1957 relocation to Los Angeles. But some things stay the same. Just like his father before him, Baral brought his son, Glenn, an all-star right-fielder for his El Cerrito little-league team in his own right, along to the game.

In between important outs, the eight-year-old clambers around the corrugated metal bleachers while his father mulls the King Solomon-like task facing the San Francisco judge this week.

Baral's first instinct is to call Hayashi, 37, a software engineer who ended up with the ball, the ball's rightful owner. "I think the case could be made that it's not over 'till it's over," he posits, poaching a line from the game's great philosopher, Yogi Berra. "That's baseball, that's just the way it is."

The walkway where the dispute between Popov and Hayashi began.

But Baral watched that game on Oct. 7, 2001. And he'd seen the tape shot by local NBC cameraman Josh Keppel, a calamitous three-minute segment played countless times on countless TV shows which shows Popov stabbing at the ball with his glove before he is smothered by a legion of frenzied fans. What if a scrum like that happened right now? Isn't Baral worried about Glenn?

"We wouldn't be near that ball," he says, shaking his head. "We wouldn't go anywhere near it."

But Glenn, surveying the right-field grass that he hopes he one day might patrol, begs to differ. "I would go into the fight for the ball," he says. "I would go in there."

Die-hard fan Anthony Perez, 24, is sitting nearby, and offers a counterpoint. "I think the first person that caught it should keep it," says Perez. "That's the American dream, catching the ball like that." Anthony's job? He works at a San Francisco strip club called Boy's Toys. Remember: This is the American dream—everyone can have a piece.

But Perez's suggestion raises other issues. Just what is a catch? This is something that Popov and Hayashi's lawyers are expected to wrangle over during the trial. Hayashi's lawyer has argued that Popov made a "sno-cone" catch (named after the shaved-ice treat for the way the ball sits unsteadily on the rim of the closed glove) and dropped the ball in the ensuing scuffle. Popov's lawyer, not unexpectedly, disagrees.

The as-yet-unnamed judge in the trial may find inspiration for his ruling in arcane whaling law, which stated that the first ship to harpoon a whale has possession of it, and hunting law, which was shaped by a dispute between two men over a dead fox.

Send Bonds' 73rd homer to the Hall of Fame: Wooten and Lewis

If the judge can't reach a decision, the mother-daughter duo of Annie Lewis and Sandra Wooten might prove to be able surrogates in the home run ball dispute. If there are any two fans in the ballpark that understand the adrenaline loosed by one of Bonds' mammoth home runs, it is these two. Since the Giants' first moved to San Francisco in 1958, the pair have seen an average of 50 games per year, including every single game this season but one. "It's electricity. It's like lightening hitting the ballpark," says Wooten. "Every homerun that Barry has hit at this park, we've been here for," her mother adds.

Lewis and Wooten sit in the front row the right-field bleachers, dressed in matching San Francisco Giants' shirts, and topped with identical straw hats, each bearing a thick layer of Giants-themed collectable lapel buttons. As the game plays out, Wooten, who has attended upwards of 2,000 games in her lifetime, peers through a pair of field glasses at the action while her mother records each play in a scorer's chart in her lap.

For this pair of die-hard fans, the answer of "whose ball is it?" is simple: No one's. "It's part of history," says Wooten. "It should go into the [Baseball] Hall of Fame where everyone can enjoy it."