"That wasw the baseball his dad had given him as a trust, a gift, a peace offering, a form of desperate love and a spiritual hand-me-down. The ball he'd more or less lost. Or his wife had snatched when they split. Or he'd accidentally dumped with the household trash" (611).
This section with Chuckie and Louis was interesting in that it brought back the baseball and waste themes along with a commentary on family structure. It's interesting that this baseball that everyone's looking for is originally a desperate attempt to connect to a son, then a piece of a petty breakup, and finally waste along with the rest of his household trash. But it isn't really, all the imagined drama, anti-drama isn't really there, Manx finds it later.
The role of the baseball as a lost connection between father and son came up a lot-- Manx betrays his son by selling it to a father who gives it to his son who loses it, and finally Nick--who has lost his connnection to his father--owns the same ball.
The companion mentions this briefly in the "Baseball and Race" section:
"Manx sells the ball--and surely his son's trust--for $32.45. Manx's betrayal of Cotter mirrors Nick's sense of loss in his relation to his father and points to an unconscious motive for Nick's eventual purchase of the Thomson ball. For Nick, the uncertainty about the authenticity of the baseball he owns functions as a displaced representation of a more primal unknowability--the true reason for his father's disappearance. In sum, the ball for Nick (and in many ways for the novel itself) is a fetish object that compensates for losses, both public and private" (39).