“We were watching the Ryne Sandberg game the other day,” said Kansas City Royals pitcher Seth Lugo, referring to a replay of a 1984 broadcast from Wrigley Field. “Sinkers in the dirt, foul balls, the umpire gives ’em to the catcher and they’re throwing ’em back to the pitcher. It wasn’t that long ago. No wonder they all had great sinkers — all the balls were scuffed!”
It’s got to be a rule, right? To root out the trickery that crafty pitchers once mastered?
“No, no, it’s not automatic,” said Marvin Hudson, an MLB umpire since 1998. “If it hits the dirt, catchers will throw it out quicker than I would. If they hand it back to me, I look at it, and if it’s not scuffed, I’ll wipe it off and keep it in my ball bag. But players are a lot different than they were back when I first came in, as far as what type of ball they want. It’s kind of comical, to be honest with you.”
Watch a ballgame today — really watch it — and you’ll be amazed at how often the pitchers, catchers and umpires change the ball. Just how many does it take to get through a game? It’s like trying to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. You can’t tell on TV, because the ball isn’t always on the screen. And you can’t tell in person unless you commit to looking solely at the ball the entire time.
So that’s what I did. Twice this summer — on July 22 in Philadelphia and August 11 in the Bronx — I tracked the fate of every baseball used in the game. (...)
Both of the games were fairly ordinary: The Phillies beat the Red Sox, 4-1, and the Yankees beat the Minnesota Twins, 6-2. They were both night games, outdoors on grass, with no precipitation. Eleven pitchers combined to throw 508 pitches — 249 in Philly, 259 in New York — while using 202 different baseballs.
That comes out to 2.51 pitches per ball, right in line with MLB’s official data from the last few seasons: 2.60 in 2023, 2.52 in 2024 and 2.44 this season through August 20th.
Pitchers tend to know this without being told. Ask a pitcher to guess the lifespan of a baseball, and he’ll almost always nail the answer.
“I’d say the average life expectancy is less than three (pitches), slightly above two — and it didn’t used to be like that,” said Boston’s Liam Hendriks, 36, who started his pro career in the Gulf Coast League in 2007.
“We had a couple dozen balls for a GCL game. Any time a ball was in play and it was fielded, you’d use that ball unless you asked for a new one. And if you were a starting pitcher that wasn’t pitching that day, you had to chase down the foul balls.”
Things were similarly loose in the college game. Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy, who spent 22 years coaching Notre Dame and Arizona State through 2009, said umpires very rarely changed out the balls.
“I’d stick a road apple in there when the guy asked for balls — you did that sometimes, slip in an old BP ball just for fun,” Murphy said. “You knew the budgets were always tight. A big slice on the ball, they’d change it out. Other than that, no way.”
For decades, this is how it was in the major leagues, too. Oversight of the game’s foundational object was not a priority.
“When Don Mincher was our first baseman, if I had a guy up like Bubba Phillips, who was a notorious first-ball hitter, they’d throw the ball around the infield and Minch would come over to the mound and I’d say, ‘Give me the infield ball,’” said Hall of Famer Jim Kaat, who pitched from 1959 to 1983. “I’d give him the game ball and he’d throw it in the dugout. So the first ball I threw was the infield ball with all the grass stains on it.”
Coaches from that era would pass down the dark arts to the next generation. Mel Stottlemyre, a contemporary of Kaat’s, had pitched with Whitey Ford for the Yankees. Ford loved using scratched baseballs – he would apply it himself with a specially designed ring, or have the catcher, Elston Howard, subtly drag the ball across a metal buckle on his shin guards.
“Whitey was a master, and Mel was a master, too,” said David Cone, who pitched on staffs coached by Stottlemyre with the Mets and Yankees. “The trick he taught me was to keep the ball in your hand when you go down and grab the rosin bag, then touch the ball to the ground and you get a little dirt on it. You’d have a little sweat on the ball so the dirt would stick. He could make the ball dance and sink naturally with just a couple of pebbles of dirt.”
Cone, who pitched from 1986 to 2003, learned the perils of this about halfway through his career. One afternoon in 1995, pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays in Oakland, Cone got a ball with a scuff in the perfect spot: the middle of the leather, on the wide opening between the seams of the horseshoe.
He put the scuff on the left side and gripped it like a sinker, knowing the ball’s right side — now heavier than the left — would naturally shift away from the blemish. And it did, much more than he intended.
“It just went vroooom — shot up and hit Mark McGwire right in the helmet,” Cone said. “Sent him to the hospital and knocked him out of the All-Star Game. That’s when I said, ‘Oh s—, I’ve got to be a little more careful here.’ Scared the hell out of me. That’s when I stopped doing a lot of that.”
Cone’s awakening roughly coincided with a shift in attitude about the supply of baseballs for any given game. Until returning from the 1994-95 strike, when teams were eager to repair fan relations, MLB discouraged players from giving balls to fans. Memos posted in clubhouses warned that fans could be injured, but teams were also just stingy with the supply.
“They were counting every baseball and reusing things – and don’t take this in a bad light, but we weren’t pushed to make it a fan-friendly experience,” said Jamie Moyer, who pitched from 1986 to 2012. “Right now it’s fan-friendly. If you can give away all the balls, go ahead, give them all away!”
That’s the illusion, anyway.
Once the game starts, if a staffer down the foul lines tosses a ball into the crowd — or a player does it, as they do at the end of almost every half-inning — it’s OK. And if a player in the dugout snatches a foul ball and holds onto it, nobody’s going to take it from him.
Almost every other ball goes to the MLB authenticator, who sits by a little tabletop in the corner of (or adjacent to) the home dugout. Once each ball is logged and labeled, it is ready to be sold; prices at a recent Phillies game ranged from $39.99 for a ball pitched by the visitors (and not put in play) to $199.99 for an RBI double hit by a Phillie. (...)
Baseballs arrive at the ballpark in cases of 72 boxes, with each box holding a dozen balls. That’s 864 balls in a case. The Phillies estimate that their storage room holds somewhere between 36 and 48 such cases. If it’s four dozen, that means more than 40,000 baseballs waiting to be used.
To be game-ready, though, the balls must be stored for two weeks, untouched, in a humidor set to 70 degrees at 57 percent relative humidity. Three hours before each game, clubhouse attendants apply a mixture of water and mud to 192 balls (16 dozen), which are then inspected by an MLB gameday compliance monitor. Fourteen dozen approved balls, or 168, must be available for each game.
The mud itself has a charming baseball backstory. It is named for Lena Blackburne, a light-hitting infielder from the 1910s, and still sifted from the same spot.
by Tyler Kepner, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Dan Goldfarb
