The grand-slam ball that immortalized Freddie Freeman as a World Series hero netted a similarly grand payout. An undisclosed bidder paid $1.56 million for the baseball that Freeman struck for a walk-off grand slam in the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Game 1 win over the Yankees on Oct. 25, SCP Auctions announced Sunday. The historic baseball received 22 bids over the course of the auction, which ran from Dec. 4 until Saturday night. Freeman’s two-out blast off of Nestor Cortes turned a one-run Dodgers deficit into a 6-3 win, putting Los Angeles up 1-0 in their eventual five-game series victory. The 413-foot homer into Dodger Stadium’s right field stands hit off of one fan’s hands, allowing 10-year-old Zachary Ruderman to dive on the ground and tap it to his father, Nico Ruderman. Zachary’s parents had told him he was leaving school early that day for an orthodontist appointment, only to surprise the fifth-grader with tickets to the game. “Our family hopes that whoever buys the ball agrees to display it in Dodger Stadium so that all fans get a chance to see one of the most famous baseballs in history,” Nico Ruderman said in a statement. Freeman, 35, won World Series MVP after hitting .300 with four home runs and 12 RBI, despite playing through an ankle injury. This month’s auction made Freeman’s grand-slam ball the third-most expensive game-used baseball ever sold. It trails only the ball that teammate Shohei Ohtani struck in September to clinch the first 50/50 season in MLB history, which sold for $4.392 million; and the ball Mark McGwire hit for his then-record 70th home run of the 1998 season, which sold for about $3 million. The ball that Yankees star Aaron Judge hit for his 62nd home run of the 2022 season, which set an American League single-season record, sold for $1.5 million. The baseball that Judge dropped in the fifth inning of Game 5 of the World Series, meanwhile, sold last week for $43,510 in an MLB-hosted auction.