by Zack Hample
JIMMY CARTER
Starting with William Howard Taft in 1910, every U.S. president except Jimmy Carter has opened at least one season with a ceremonial first pitch. But Carter is one of just two presidents to have caught a foul ball at a game—George H. W. Bush is the other, having accomplished the feat as a kid at Yankee Stadium—and it happened in Atlanta on the same day as Sheen’s shenanigans. Carter, 71 years old at the time, was sitting in the front row near the third-base dugout and made a bare-handed catch on a foul ball hit by the Padres’ Ken Caminiti. The crowd responded with a standing ovation, and the president later received praise from one of the players.
“He showed good hands,” said Braves catcher Javy Lopez.
MARK MCGWIRE
Mark McGwire accomplished two great feats in 1998. Not only did he hit the most valuable baseball in history, but he also caught a foul ball during the World Series—as a spectator in the stands. McGwire’s Cardinals had failed to reach the postseason, so the slugger was available to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 4 got under way at Qualcomm Stadium. In the top of the fourth inning, Yankees leadoff man Chuck Knoblauch swung a bit early on a pitch from Padres starter Kevin Brown and bounced the ball into foul territory down the third-base line. McGwire, who was sitting in the front row, effortlessly bare-handed it. Then he stood and smiled, held up the ball, and flipped it into the crowd behind him.
BEN AFFLECK
Memo to Ben Affleck and anyone else who’s privileged enough to sit in the front row: when a foul pop-up is about to land in your lap, the fielder is allowed to reach into the stands to catch it, but you have every right to go for it as well. And when that fielder is on the visiting team, it’s not just your right to snag the ball—it’s your duty.
Affleck, seated in the front row beside the Red Sox dugout at Fenway Park on July 30, 2006, bungled his foul ball opportunity and got booed by 36,000 fans. That’s because the ball was hit by a Sox player and Affleck’s lame attempt to snag it—in front of his wife Jennifer Garner no less—enabled Angels first baseman Howie Kendrick to run over and make the catch.
Two weeks later, in a segment on Access Hollywood, Affleck received a surprise birthday gift. Kendrick had autographed the ball and sent it to him with a videotaped message that said, “Sorry I didn’t let you have that foul ball, but I have a job to do, y’know. Nice try, though, even for a Red Sox fan, so here ya go.”
GEORGE BRETT
Offense has a way of overshadowing defense. Take George Brett, for example. You know that he had over 3,000 hits and that he won the batting title in three different decades, right? But did you know that he was a Gold Glove third baseman in 1985? Or that he caught a foul ball at Game 2 of the 2002 World Series?
Brett was sitting six rows behind the third-base dugout when Angels designated hitter Brad Fullmer blooped a check-swing pop-up in his direction.
“I just put down my beer with my left hand and reached up and caught it,” recalled the Hall of Famer. “Then I took a bite of my fish taco.”
It was a solid play, but Brett committed an egregious error later on.
“I lost the ball getting into the car after the game in the parking lot,” he said. “It slipped out of my jacket pocket.”
DOUG FLUTIE
According to Sports Illustrated, football Hall of Famer Doug Flutie snagged a foul ball at a Red Sox–Devil Rays game at Fenway Park in May 2004. Unfortunately, the Rays didn’t actually visit Boston that month—but they made the trip in late April, so let’s assume that’s when it happened. As the story goes, Flutie was sitting in the front row of seats outside a suite on the first-base side; sometime around the seventh inning, Kevin Millar hit a foul ball that sailed over Flutie’s head, ricocheted off some Plexiglas, bounced off a man’s hands two rows behind him, and plopped into his lap.
Fairly standard stuff. But here’s where it gets interesting. On April 14, 2005, Flutie snagged another foul at Fenway, this time off the bat of Tino Martinez. It was a line drive that hooked down the right-field foul line. Flutie, seated in the third row, caught the ball on the fly and later told a reporter from the New England Sports Network (NESN) that it was the fourth consecutive game at which he’d gotten a ball.
What made headlines, however, was not the incredible ballhawking feat itself, but rather the fact that Flutie—a professional athlete!—had used a baseball glove to achieve it. Sports radio hosts were so critical, and the topic received so much airtime, that Sports Illustrated referred to it as a controversy.
“That’s just Doug. He’s a big kid,” his wife Laurie told the magazine. “He won’t go to a baseball game without bringing his glove.”
“No way,” agreed Flutie. “Now I just have to hide it in my bag.”
JUSTIN BIEBER
In 2010, at the delicate age of 16, Justin Bieber became the youngest male solo artist with a number-one album in 47 years1—but his legacy wasn’t fully cemented until he snagged a foul ball six weeks later at U.S. Cellular Field.
“Awsome [sic] time at the whitesox game,” tweeted the teen idol soon after the final out. “Caught a foul ball and gave it to a fan. Oprah tomorrow. Cheahhhh.”
To clarify, Bieber was in fact in Chicago to tape an interview with Oprah Winfrey—he also got to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the game—but he didn’t actually make a clean catch. No sir. The ball, fouled off by White Sox first baseman Paul Konerko with one out in the bottom of the third inning, bounced into Bieber’s luxury suite after deflecting off another fan’s fingertips. Bieber then gave the ball to the fan and later autographed it.
That fan, a high school senior named Alex Rittel, put his souvenir to good use.
“I took the ball to school today to show everyone,” he said. “So many girls were jealous. So many girls.”
Justin Bieber knows what’s up. (Photo Credit 5.2)
1 Stevie Wonder was 13 when his album Recorded Live: The 12-Year-Old Genius was released in 1963.
There is no getting away from the fact that the ball is quite lively this year … there are too many home runs and long, drawn-out games.
—Ban Johnson, American League president, 1925
CHAPTER 6
THE EVOLUTION OF THE BALL
When it comes to the baseball itself, many fans know the basics—or at least they think they do. They’ll tell you that it weighs five ounces (“give or take”) and that the cover is made of horsehide (“or … wait, is it cowhide?”) and that there’s some kind of corkish rubbery thing in the middle with yarn wrapped around it (“the balls are machine-made, right?”) and that the balls come from Haiti (“or Costa Rica or China or Taiwan or one of those places”).
When you consider that the ball has gone through more changes than any other piece of equipment in the history of baseball, it’s easy to see why people—even die-hard fans—aren’t always sure how it’s made. But history isn’t solely responsible for the confusion; check out Major League Baseball’s current rule book and you’ll see that the specifications aren’t all that specific. Rule 1.09 states: “The ball shall be a sphere formed by yarn wound around a small core of cork, rubber or similar material, covered with two strips of white horsehide or cowhide, tightly stitched together. It shall weigh not less than five nor more than 5¼ ounces avoirdupois and measure not less than nine nor more than 9¼ inches in circumference.”
This murky rule raises more questions than it answers: What kind of yarn? How small a core? What materials are considered “similar” to cork and rubber? What the hell does “avoirdupois” mean?1 And most important, how tight should the stitches be? Too loose and the ball will be dead; too tight and it’ll be flying all over the place.
Most fans are aware that there’ve been some controversies in recent years about the balls being too lively, but the juiced-ball debate goes back much further than McGwire and Sosa, Mantle and Maris, and even Babe Ruth. It began in 1867 when the Nationals of Washington, an experienced team made up of government employees, drubbed several
opponents by using a hopped-up ball that favored their own potent offense. At that time, the home team was responsible for providing the ball—there was quite a variety of balls from which to choose—but even after the ball was standardized, manufacturing techniques continued to develop.
For the better part of the 20th century, the evolution of the ball threatened the integrity of the sport by skewing the delicate competitive balance between the pitcher and batter. During some seasons, the number of home runs suggested that the batters had an edge, while in other seasons it seemed as if 1–0 games were the norm. The biggest statistical aberrations led some folks to denounce the ball, while others (especially executives in the ball manufacturing industry) defended it and blamed everything else.
Early baseballs, such as the “lemon-peel” ball (left) and the “belt” ball (right), were stitched differently. (Photo Credit 6.1)
But let’s go back even further, to the early 1840s, when the first baseballs began taking shape. The earliest balls weighed as little as three ounces, but because the specs were so loose, the size and composition varied dramatically. Some were even larger than the balls in use today. Balls were homemade, often assembled hastily before neighborhood pickup games. Just about any small, hard object—like a walnut, rock, or bullet—was used as the core. String (perhaps from an old fishing line) or yarn (possibly from an unraveled sock) was then wrapped around it until the sphere was palm-sized. Finally, a piece of dark brown leather (typically cut from old shoes) was used for the cover and sewn on, often in a one-piece “lemon-peel” style but occasionally as a two- or three-piece “belt” ball. Some balls were very lively because they had a melted rubber center; teams that used them sometimes scored over 100 runs per game.2
Here’s how the baseball—as well as the sport itself—continued to evolve:
1847 A physician named Daniel “Doc” Adams was elected president of the New York Knickerbockers, one of the primary and dominant teams in the early years of organized baseball. Before long, Adams voluntarily began making all the balls for most of the teams in and around New York City. Simply owning a baseball was such a big deal that some teams raised the stakes of their competitions by playing for the ball itself. Each ball had to last for the entire game, and at the conclusion it was awarded to the winner. The Knickerbockers used a particularly large ball that weighed as much as 6.5 ounces and measured 11 inches in circumference. Adams was the first ball maker to discover that the tighter a ball was wound, the livelier it would be, but the balls he made remained dead and generally light in weight—so light that his outfielders weren’t able to throw the balls all the way back to the pitcher. They needed to relay the balls to a teammate, and by the end of the decade the shortstop position was born.
1848 John Van Horn, a player on Brooklyn’s Baltic Base Ball Club, started getting paid by the team to make balls. A shoemaker who initially produced just 50 to 60 balls a year, Van Horn is recognized as the first commercial manufacturer of baseballs.
1853 The typical ball was small but dense, measuring 2 inches in diameter and packed with 1 to 2.5 ounces of lead in the center. Knitting yarn was wound tightly around the core, and the ball was covered with chamois skin.3 These skins were always brown, but ranged in shade from medium to dark.
1854 The three main teams in New York—the Knickerbockers, Gothams, and Eagles—had a meeting and decided to make the ball bigger: 5.5 to 6 ounces with a diameter between 2.75 and 3.5 inches. This was supposed to be the new ball, but the specifications (which placed no restriction on the amount of rubber) didn’t last long.
1857 Sixteen teams from New York formed the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), held a convention, and voted to tweak the specs once again. The new ball (which was to be stitched only in lemon-peel fashion) weighed between 6 and 6.25 ounces and measured 10 to 10.25 inches in circumference.
1858 At the second annual baseball convention, everyone agreed that the composition of the ball had to be regulated. The core would be made of india rubber, wrapped with yarn, and covered with leather—but these new specs served more as a guideline than a rule; at a game on May 31, 1858, members of the visiting team insisted on using their own rubberless ball. They’d made it by wrapping yarn as loosely as possible around a bullet so that the ball would be the right size. Not only was the ball hard to catch, but several players had their fingers twisted and suffered other nasty hand injuries. The “bullet” ball was never seen again. Meanwhile, a man named Harrison Harwood founded Harwood & Sons in Natick, Massachusetts, and opened the first baseball factory, a three-story building with more than 9,000 square feet. Harwood was the first manufacturer to stitch the ball with a figure-eight cover, a design often credited to Ellis Drake, despite his failure to patent it. Drake, whose father was a shoemaker, claimed to have come up with the idea in school in the 1840s and made a prototype with scraps of his father’s leather. Some historians believe, however, that the figure-eight cover was invented by Colonel William A. Cutler.
1859 The dimensions of the ball were reduced to 5.75 to 6 ounces with a circumference of 9.75 to 10 inches. Around this time, John Van Horn was dominating the New York ball-making business.
1860 The weight of the ball was further reduced to a maximum of 5.75 ounces.
1861 The NABBP shrank the dimensions yet again, by a quarter-inch and a quarter-ounce. Baseballs started being made with lighter-colored covers. This helped the fielders to see them coming off the bat against the dark wooden backdrops of old ballparks.
1862 Henry Chadwick denounced the ball as “overelastic.”
1863 Balls started being widely manufactured. In New York the three biggest ball makers were John Van Horn, Daniel Adams, and Harvey Ross—men who personally handcrafted every single ball—but there were many lesser-known ball makers whose materials and manufacturing techniques varied. As a result, some balls were lively, others were dead, and games were often determined by the type of ball selected by the home team. Visiting teams with great hitters often found themselves playing with a dead ball, and vice versa. Even if the type of ball was agreed upon beforehand, that first ball might “accidentally” get lost and a different ball would conveniently be offered as a replacement.
1864 One of the most significant rule changes of the era was instituted: the one-bounce catch no longer counted as an out. Prior to this, no one wanted to use a ball that was so lively that it would’ve bounced over the fielders’ heads, but once this rule was abandoned, ball makers began producing even livelier balls. The result? More errors, more injuries, longer games, and a sloppy style of play that ruled the sport for the remainder of the decade.
1866 The ball was supposed to weigh exactly 5.75 ounces and measure 9.75 inches in circumference.
1867 The Nationals of Washington went on a huge baseball tour and got embroiled in the first major juiced-ball controversy in baseball history. The only team to beat the Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1867, they were accused of playing with a lively ball that helped their own talented hitters and proved difficult for opposing fielders to catch. (Baseball gloves hadn’t yet been invented.) Speaking of lively baseballs, John Van Horn was making balls by cutting strips from old rubber shoes, balling them into crude spheres that weighed anywhere from 2 to 4 ounces, and heating the rubber until it melted and fused together. He then wrapped cotton yarn around the rubber center and stitched a sheepskin cover on top. Although these “elastic” balls were exceptionally lively, they got hit out of shape within a few innings because the flimsy cotton yarn wasn’t resilient enough. Despite the NABBP’s new ruling that the baseball had to weigh between 5 and 5.25 ounces and measure 9.25 to 9.5 inches in circumference, Van Horn’s balls often weighed more than 6 ounces and had a 10-inch circumference. Harwood & Sons made their balls according to the specifications and sold $150,000 worth that year alone.
1868 Manufacturers were forced to put their names on the balls, as well as figures listing the weight and size. Also, for the first time, the official rules stated that the bal
l would “become the property of the winning club as a trophy of victory.” This keepsake was sometimes painted and decorated with the date and the score of the game. Teams with good fielders generally used the smallest possible ball with the least elasticity. Alex Waugh, a toy maker from New York City, catered to the slick fielders by introducing a dead ball that was made without any rubber in the core. The amount of rubber had been decreasing anyway because the elastic ball was so dangerous.
This painted “trophy” ball from 1871 is blue on top, green on the bottom, and light tan in the middle. (Photo Credit 6.2)
1869 At the 13th annual NABBP convention, the Philadelphia Athletics, known for their powerful offense, adamantly opposed a proposal that would have limited the ball’s rubber content to 1.5 ounces. The Red Stockings, dominant in every facet of the game, embarked on a historic season-long tour and used balls that may have contained far more rubber than that. (Their balls also reportedly had tan or white stitches.) In the process of compiling a stunning 57-0 record, the team was accused of using balls that were too lively. In retrospect, there’s no way to determine if the balls were intentionally juiced, but the Red Stockings’ stats were undeniably inflated. Their shortstop—and future Hall of Famer—George Wright played in 52 games, hit 59 home runs, and scored 339 times.
1870 On July 9, 1870, the New York Clipper ran an article that criticized the sport and blamed the ball. “A change in the composition of the ball used is necessary to the full development of the beauties of the game,” it said. “The record of this season’s play thus far presents a catalogue of severe injuries … on the ball field, arising from the use of an over-elastic and heavy ball, which calls for a prompt remedy.” The article suggested limiting the rubber content to 1.5 ounces, and it encouraged fans to boycott games that were played with lively balls. As public sentiment began to change and people demanded a tighter style of play, some ball manufacturers advertised “dead balls.” Later in the season, as another ball-related need manifested—namely, reducing the glare from the sun—several manufacturers introduced red baseballs. One New York—based sporting goods company called Peck & Snyder combined the two trends and ran an ad for its “Dead Red Ball” that said: “Our new Ball is made of the best yarn, covering an ounce and a half of the best Unvulcanized Rubber, and is of a Dark Red color, thereby getting rid of the objectionable dazzling whiteness of the ordinary ball which bothers fielders and batsmen on a Sunny Day.” Meanwhile, Harwood & Sons was now filling single orders for as many as 6,000 baseballs. Natick, Massachusetts, the town where they set up shop, was described by the New York Times as “the greatest base ball manufactory in the world.” Harrison Harwood employed more than 200 women and divided the factory into different areas where groups of them each performed one specialized task. For example, one group cut the figure-eight covers and passed them along to another group that punched the holes around the edges through which the balls were later stitched. The covers, previously made of flimsy sheepskin, were now made of horsehide—a material so durable that before it was stitched onto the balls employees had to roll it up in damp cloths to make it pliable. The best balls were stitched with silk thread; low-end balls got linen thread. All the balls were then left to sit around for a few days to dry out. On November 30, 1870, the weight and size of the ball changed for the last time. The specifications that we have in place today—5 to 5.25 ounces and 9 to 9.25 inches in circumference—were instituted.
