Jim Litke AP columnist

Anybody who says he wouldn’t ransom a milestone home-run ball is either a liar or a fool.

Walter Kowalczyk is neither. So here’s hoping that Matt Murphy, who emerged from the Tuesday night scrum in right field at AT&T Park in possession of Barry Bonds’ 756th, is every bit as cold-blooded about cashing in. That goes for Adam Hughes, too, who latched onto No. 755 in San Diego.

That’s the baseball way.

Not long after catching Alex Rodriguez’s 500th home run ball, Kowalczyk changed the Internet URL on his online home page to www.LuckySOB.com — one of the few personal details Newsday was able to glean before Kowalczyk’s MySpace page went private. Next, the 29-year-old Rutgers graduate student delegated his older brother, Brian, a Trenton gang-crimes cop, to open negotiations.

“He doesn’t know where to put it or what to do with it,” said Brian Kowalczyk, who was anything but indecisive about what to do first.

“I’m going up tomorrow,” he added, “with my weapon.”

Chances are good Brian won’t have to use it to get top dollar from a potential buyer. His little brother, who’s planning to attend law school next spring, already displayed an impressive grasp of the game’s economics by turning down the Yankees’ initial offer Saturday of as much as $10,000 and enough jerseys, bats and balls from Rodriguez and selected teammates to fill up a locker room.

A-Rod took the rejection in stride, saying, “I’m kind of just going to let it sit for a few days. It’s his ball. Let him enjoy it and then go from there.”

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By some estimates, “there” is already a $100,000 neighborhood and could get pricier in a hurry if Rodriguez is a sentimental sort. But that pales next to the half-million large a number of collectors believe the latest Bonds’ souvenir will bring. And since Murphy had a bloodied face, as well the baseball, to remember the evening by, he might be determined to get every penny.

Listen to Bud Selig any time he talks about this being the game’s “golden era.” The commissioner never mentions the record-breaking numbers MLB’s players are compiling in this still-supersized era. Instead, he cites the record attendance figures and increased TV revenues filling up the owners’ coffers faster than ever. It’s telling that he chose not to be on hand when Bonds put Henry Aaron, Selig’s pal, in the rearview mirror for good.

Just as telling, perhaps, has been the plummeting market for milestone baseballs. When Mark McGwire pushed the single-season home-run record to 70 in 1998 and precious few people knew the role of performance-enhancing drugs already was playing, the ball wound up selling for $3 million. Sentiment at the time was such that a fan named Deni Allen, who wound up with No. 60 that season, gave the ball to McGwire for some autographs and the chance to take batting practice with McGwire and the rest of the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium.

Soon enough, he regretted leaving as much as $200,000 on the table and said he hoped MLB would give some money to those few, who like himself, gave the ball back.

Barry Bonds commemorative page AP Click to get a wallpaper. Right click and copy for: 1280x1024, 1024x768 or 800x600 pictures.

“I was definitely drunk with excitement,” Allen said later. “I got caught up in the whole Big Mac essence.”

That was no longer possible by the time Bonds pushed the record to 73 in 2001. Collectors, too, lost much of their zeal for the increasingly dubious record baseballs.

Todd McFarlane, who made a fortune after creating the comic book, “Spawn,” was the buyer for McGwire’s 70th. He bid $517,500 for Bonds’ 73rd — yet even that figure was widely viewed as an attempt to prop up the market.

Murphy would consider himself fortunate to get that much. Unlike A-Rod, Bonds claims to have no interest to what happens to that horsehide-covered piece of history.

“I don’t want it,” he said at a news conference afterward. “I never ever believed the home run ball belonged to a player. Ever.”

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But it doesn’t belong to the rest of us, either, not in the way it would have once. It will hardly matter to most whether the ball is secreted away in a private collection, or taken out on tour every now and then as part of memorabilia show, or even on permanent display at the Hall of Fame.

Baseball was so determined to get back into people’s pockets after the disillusioning strike of 1994 that once the players and the people in charge figured out how much we’d dig the long ball, they never bothered to total up the real cost. They thought they were just selling baseballs, when what they were really selling was baseball’s soul.