Every Baseball Is Rubbed with This Special Mud Before It Gets Used [Video]

By Casey Chan Oct 16, 2011 4:00 PM 25,742 39

Baseball, America's past past time, is a pretty quirky game with quirkier players and quirkiest traditions. Chew tobacco! Sunflower seeds! Rally caps! Seventh Inning Stretch! And even a "special mud" that gets rubbed onto every single baseball in the major and minor leagues. Huh?

The mud is called Lena Blackburne Original Baseball Rubbing Mud and it comes from a secret spot in South Jersey off the Delaware River. Jim Bintliff, who owns Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, skims the top inch layer on the muddy riverbanks for collection and then puts the mud through screens to refine it before packaging it, aging it and shipping it to all the baseball teams in the MLB. Bintliff says the texture of his special mud is like chocolate pudding. Tasty.

The mud is applied because new baseballs are much too slick for pitchers to grip properly. Baseball ended up using Lena Blackburne's special mud because its fine-grain sediments properties added grip without scratching the leather and messing up a ball's trajectory. The tradition of manually rubbing this special mud into balls started in the 1950's and continues to this day. [NewsWorks]

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U.S. Forest Service, Science Save Baseball Spectators from Broken Bat Schrapnel [Science]

When MLB spectator Susan Rhodes was struck by a broken bat at a Dodgers game in 2008, it broke her jaw and set off an investigation into the alarming number of bats (750 in 3 months) that shattered that season.

The investigation was headed up by the U.S. Forest service and cost a relatively cheap $500,000 to complete. The results, nevertheless, were pretty profound.

Two things were to blame for the brittle bats used in the 2008 MLB season: Maple wood and the cut of the grain. In previous seasons, ash was the preferred wood, and 2008 represented the year the MLB switched over to more maple than ash. Ironically, maple was selected over ash because it was deemed to be more durable.

As for the grain, the lines are supposed run along the shaft in a straight top to bottom fashion. When they don't the mistake is easily spotted and addressed—so long as the wood is ash. With maple the discrepancy is extremely hard to spot.

In the wake of the report, the MLB has required all maple bats include a black dot on the handle. The ink allows the manufacturer to see any grain discrepancies with the angle of the grain. In the 2009, the year the mandate took effect, broken bat incidents were down 30 percent, and have decreased each season to the present.

Now all they have to do is partner with someone who can help investigate why the games are so long and boring. [Discover]

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