Fox News reports that Matt Murphy, the baseball fan who caught Barry Bonds’ 756th home run ball, will be auctioning it off:

The 21-year-old New York man said Tuesday he had no choice but to sell the ball — several people told him he would be taxed on the valuable souvenir if he holds onto it.

It just doesn’t seem quite fair, now does it? Find a pearl, a Spanish doubloon, or a baseball that is now worth hundreds of thousands of dollars because it touched the right bat at the right time, and it has to be reported as taxable income? What’s worse, the amount he has to report is the amount other people think the baseball is worth, because he wasn’t going to sell it. I could understand if he was going to sell it and then take the tax hit, but this seems like an imposition to me.

I suppose one can’t complain too hard about getting 50% of a half-million dollars, but losing the other half of that looks like a $250,000 theft.