What do you think of this fact?
A brand-new baseball looks perfect: bright white, smooth, shiny. That’s exactly the problem. New balls are so slick that pitchers have trouble gripping them, and according to the Baseball Hall of Fame, their glare sometimes bothered hitters too. So before a big-league game, the shine has to go. And it goes with mud. Very specific mud.
A coach and his secret creek
Teams tried all sorts of things first, including tobacco juice, spit and infield dirt, according to WHYY and Princeton Info. Regular dirt was often too coarse and scratched the covers. In 1938, American League umpire Harry Geisel complained about the job, the Hall of Fame writes. Lena Blackburne, then a coach for the Philadelphia Athletics, remembered the fine mud he had found as a boy in a creek in southern New Jersey. He gave Geisel a can, and soon every American League team was supplied. He only started selling to the National League in the mid-1950s.
Still a family secret
Blackburne died in 1968 and left the business to his childhood friend John Haas, who was to keep the source secret, says the Hall of Fame. It has stayed in the family ever since. Jim Bintliff, Haas’s grandson, started digging with his grandfather at age 9, according to Princeton Info. WHYY describes how he skims off just the top layer of mud with a shovel, screens it at home and lets it age before shipping.
The official rules require umpires to make sure new balls are properly rubbed, the Hall of Fame notes. Before a game, umpires, sometimes with clubhouse attendants, rub 8 to 10 dozen balls, with 6 dozen more in reserve, Princeton Info reports. Eos says each ball gets a finger-sized dollop.
Bonus fact: A team from the University of Pennsylvania analyzed the mud in a study in PNAS. According to Eos, it spreads like skin cream while its grit adds grip, but nothing about its minerals or mechanics turned out to be magical.
So every big-league pitch starts with a little bit of New Jersey dirt.