The Baseball

by Zack Hample

  1926 The official National League ball could be bought directly from Spalding for $2, and according to the company’s catalog it was “warranted to last a full game when used under ordinary conditions.” Spalding’s cheapest ball was the ten-cent Rocket, which was listed as “a good lively boys’ size ball; two-piece cover.” In August 1926, with home run numbers down in both leagues, Baseball magazine reported that the dead ball had returned: “The sluggers are hitting this new-old ball with all the force at their command, but they find it very difficult to hit it beyond the upturned hands of an awaiting outfielder.”

  1928 Yellow baseballs were used in a minor league game between the Louisville Colonels and Milwaukee Brewers.

  1930 So much for the dead ball. As offensive statistics climbed toward new heights, legendary sportswriter Ring Lardner described the ball as “a leather-covered sphere stuffed with dynamite.” The entire National League batted .303, Hack Wilson set the single-season record by knocking in 191 runs, and Wally Berger set National League rookie records with 38 homers and 119 RBIs. Some people proposed shortening the distance from the mound to home plate or removing the gloss from the ball’s surface—anything to help pitchers regain their edge. Barney Dreyfuss suggested that batters only be awarded a double when they hit the ball over a fence less than 300 feet away.

  1931 The ball was deadened and equilibrium was restored, especially in the National League, where home runs plunged 45 percent and the batting average dropped 26 points to .277. The introduction of the “cushioned cork center”—an extra layer of rubber that encased the core of the ball—made the biggest difference, but there were other factors that helped to trim offense.9 National League pitchers in particular got an extra boost because the seams were raised on the Spalding ball. “The new ball affords a better grip and this has given my curveball a sharper, downward break,” said Reds pitcher Red Lucas, who had posted a career-high 5.38 ERA in 1930. “I couldn’t get that result with last year’s ball.” Hack Wilson also noticed the difference as he slogged through a mediocre season. “If your bat just caught a piece of the 1930 ball,” he said, “it might travel into the bleachers. Now, the same shot sends a fly within reach of the fielders.” Cubs first baseman Charlie Grimm compared baseballs from 1930 and 1931 by dropping each one twice on a concrete surface. In round one the older ball bounced higher, and in round two he dropped them so they’d land on their seams. “The old one arose vertically,” he said. “The new failed to come up true.” Just about everyone agreed that the new ball was better—even Pirates third baseman Pie Traynor, whose batting average dropped 68 points in 1931. “The present ball makes for a better game,” he said. “Last year there were too many slaughters.… Such burlesque performances not only wrecked the mound staffs but they deadened interest.” While Spalding and Reach tweaked the major league balls, a man named George Senn patented a practice ball with a core that was intentionally placed off-center. This invention, known as the “Wobble Ball,” was designed to help pitchers throw better curveballs and make fielding more of a challenge.

  The September 1933 issue of Baseball magazine featured new Indians manager (and 417-game winner) Walter Johnson on the cover. (Photo Credit 6.6)

  1933 There was widespread speculation that the National League ball was deader—and had been for years. In its September 1933 issue, Baseball magazine supported this theory by pointing out that there’d been “brilliant moundsmanship” even during the 1920s when the ball was supposedly livelier than ever.

  1934 The National League ball switched from red-and-black stitching to all red.

  1935 Jumping on the bandwagon, the American League changed the stitching on its ball from red and blue to all red. This was also the year that the Hubberts’ stitching operation expanded from their home to a factory.

  1936 Aside from their logos, Spalding and Reach balls were proclaimed identical. The core weighed ⅞ of an ounce and consisted of a small cork sphere surrounded by two layers of rubber—one black and one red. The core was wrapped with 71 yards of 4/8 white woolen yarn followed by 41 yards of 4/15 white woolen yarn. Then, after receiving a layer of rubber cement, the ball was wrapped with 41 yards of 4/15 blue-gray woolen yarn and 100 yards of 20/2 fine cotton yarn. At this stage the ball was supposed to weigh 4.625 ounces and measure 8.875 inches in circumference. A second coating of rubber cement was applied, and then the alum-tanned horsehide cover was stitched on with red thread. The cover was 1/20 of an inch thick and weighed half an ounce.

  1938 On April 27, 1938, yellow baseballs staged a comeback and were used in a college game at Bakers Field between Columbia and Fordham. On August 2, 1938, the Dodgers and Cardinals used yellow balls in the first game of a doubleheader at Ebbets Field, which Brooklyn won, 6–2. The balls, which were known as “stitched lemons,” made the players’ hands yellow, and winning pitcher Freddie Fitzsimmons complained that the balls were too slick. In other colorful news, the Middle-Atlantic League—a Class C minor league with such teams as the Dayton Ducks and Johnstown Johnnies—used balls with white stitches throughout the season. League president Elmer Daily thought the stitches were better for night games, but no one agreed, and the balls weren’t used again. Meanwhile, as the National League outpitched the American League by a full run in the ERA column, players grumbled about the balls and insisted there was a difference. “In order to pitch a curve in the American League,” said Yankees pitcher Monte Pearson, “the leather must have been in the game a little while.… With the National League ball you can do things right off. The cover feels thicker, looser. The stitching is raised and gives you a chance to put on your stuff, and control is better.” Naturally, the Bureau of Standards got involved and tested the balls at Griffith Stadium. H. L. Dryden, the head of the Bureau’s Division of Mechanics and Sound, built an air gun that used ballistic pendulums to shoot a one-pound piece of wood 200 feet per second into the ball. Designed to re-create the force of a batter making contact, the device sent balls flying at an average distance of 367 feet. Dryden concluded that there wasn’t much of a difference between the balls—that the covers and stitching had little to do with the liveliness. “The science of the home run is hard to pin down,” he said. “Give me two baseballs and I can prove almost anything. The emphasis should be on the batter, not the ball.” Dryden’s statement didn’t deter a group of two dozen players and baseball executives from conducting their own unofficial experiment at Oriole Park. With roughly 500 fans on hand, the players took batting practice—and took aim for the bleachers—with balls from both leagues. A reporter named Randall Cassell noted the difference: “Both will travel over the fences when hit properly. However, the N.L. ball has a distinctly ‘dead’ sound coming off the bat.”

  1939 The lemon ball hadn’t yet been deemed a total lemon, and the Dodgers used yellow balls for three games. Meanwhile, in a feat of innovation still with us today, Athletics third base coach Lena Blackburne began selling mud to professional teams (See chapter 8 for more). When rubbed onto the balls, the mud reduced the glare and improved the grip without scratching the covers or making them too dark.

  1941 Another world war meant another shortage of materials. On December 11, 1941—four days after the attack on Pearl Harbor—the U.S. government prohibited the use of crude rubber in baseballs. Spalding and Reach claimed they had enough rubber in stock to manufacture all the balls for 1942, but there was serious concern about what would happen beyond that. The manufacturers experimented with plastic cores, which seemed to be adequate, but then the government banned plastic as well.

  1942 As the rubber supply dwindled, offense declined, baseball executives panicked, and Spalding falsely claimed that the balls weren’t being manufactured differently. High-quality horsehide was no longer being imported from Belgium—cheaper domestic horsehide was now being used to cover the balls—and the crude rubber in the core had been replaced with less resilient reclaimed rubber. As word leaked out and the controversy grew, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the sport’s first commissioner, for
med a special committee to investigate alternative materials for baseballs. The best solution? Golf ball pills. Baseball wasn’t the only sport affected by wartime shortages; the government also banned the use of rubber thread in golf balls, which effectively prevented the balls from being manufactured at all. It just so happened that 720,000 golf ball pills—tiny cores made of a non-elastic rubber called balata—had already been manufactured, and on September 9, 1942, the rubber and rubber products branch of the War Production Board approved the use of these pills as baseball cores for the 1943 season. Spalding manufactured sample balls and, with further permission from the government, padded each pill with 0.42 ounces of vulcanized scrap rubber. Several teams tested the balls in practice and said they were okay.

  1943 The balata balls turned out to be dead. Seriously dead. All four games on Opening Day resulted in shutouts, and the first home run wasn’t hit until the 12th game of the season. (It also didn’t help that many of the sport’s biggest stars were off fighting in the war.) Commissioner Landis vowed to bring back the rabbit ball. Reds general manager Warren Giles threatened to use his own type of ball. Something had to be done. With baseball hugely responsible for raising the morale of a war-weary public, it was crucial to regain the competitive balance that made the sport so exciting. On April 22, 1943, the manufacturers tried to distance themselves from the debate by arranging for a representative to publicly cut open one of the new balls. Big mistake. The dissection revealed that the yarn was damp and loosely wound. No one knew how it happened, but the theory was that the new ball was susceptible to the weather and somehow absorbed the moisture of the spring air. Lou Coleman, the vice president of Spalding, issued the following statement:

  The official 1943 baseball as adopted by the major league committee is inherently satisfactory. The shipment of baseballs sent out for the opener of the season, unfortunately, did not measure up to standard. Investigations have been made and the reason discovered. In the manufacture of baseballs a layer of rubber cement is applied between layers of wool. Under war conditions this cement is made from reprocessed rubber. The cement used on the baseballs turned out by the factory in recent shipments has proved of inferior quality. Instead of providing resilience the cement hardened to a point where the wool was affected. This deadened the ball.

  Spalding announced that it needed two weeks to prepare a new batch of balls, and once they were ready, National League president Ford Frick made sure that every team started using them on the same day. Ultimately both leagues rounded up enough prewar balls to finish the season, but the statistical damage was done. There were fewer runs scored per game than in any season from 1919 to 1968.10

  1944 To the great joy of all involved, the government lifted its ban on cork and rubber, and Spalding resumed normal production of baseballs.

  1947 With the real ball back, the National League hit 886 home runs—the highest total since 1930 and more than double the amount from 1943. Edward Hubbert, still stitching for Spalding, told The Sporting News that the 1947 ball was juiced. “It is the fastest, liveliest ball made,” he claimed, “and if records aren’t broken, it will be because there are no Ruths, Gehrigs or Foxxes around.” Hall of Famer Stan Musial, then playing his sixth season in St. Louis, agreed that hitters had an edge. “The ball definitely is livelier. It goes farther,” he said. But Phillies manager Ben Chapman, whose team hit a National League—worst .258 in 1947, wasn’t convinced that the ball had changed. “Take one look at the batting averages on my club and you won’t say the ball is any livelier,” he quipped.

  1948 Indians owner Bill Veeck secretly froze some baseballs and pitched them to Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg, just for fun. Greenberg, who had retired the previous season, reportedly couldn’t hit the balls past shortstop and had no idea why—until he felt one of them. Meanwhile, as both leagues combined to surpass the previous season’s home run total, the juiced-ball debate continued. Yankees manager Bucky Harris said, “They have done something to the ball. Men who used to find it tough to drive a ball 350 feet now send it 450 feet.” Connie Mack, still managing the Philadelphia Athletics, defended the manufacturers. “There is nothing wrong with the ball,” he insisted. “It has not been changed. They raise that cry every spring.”

  1949 While some rules became more relaxed—the home team was no longer required to provide an exact number of balls, and the winning team was no longer officially awarded the final ball—other rules were put into effect. For the first time, the rule book stated that the ball had to “meet the approved resiliency standards,” which was great except for one thing: these standards had not yet been established. In May 1949, George Reach, the 81-year-old son of Al Reach, gave a candid interview to the Philadelphia Evening News about the ball’s resiliency. He admitted that during his tenure in the family business, the Reach factory had made the balls livelier some years and then deadened them when they got too lively—but he didn’t specify when these adjustments had taken place. When asked about 1911, the first full season that featured the cork center, Reach said, “The ball was the liveliest it has ever been. In fact, we had to tone it down. We were making infielders out of outfielders.” There was, of course, a reason why Reach never squashed the lively ball debate. “We thought the arguments were wonderful,” he said. “Look at all the advertising we got. Why, some papers used to run stories on the front page about the rabbit ball.”

  1950 Major league teams combined for more than 2,000 home runs—quite an expense considering that balls cost $28 per dozen. As the annual juiced-ball debate got under way, one writer suggested using lively balls only in big ballparks. The Sporting News, however, didn’t think the ball was responsible for the inflated offense and ran the following front-page headline: “It’s Putrid Hurling, Not Rabbit in Ball.” Spalding moved from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, and the Hubberts stayed in business by turning their attention to softballs.

  1953 Max Kase, the sports editor of the New York Journal-American, asked Joseph S. Ward, the head of the Materials Testing Laboratory at Cooper Union College, to test American League balls from 1952 and 1953. Ward accepted the challenge and, with help from a colleague named Joseph M. DeSalvo, detected two key differences. First, when dropped from a height of 26 feet, 8 inches, the 1953 ball bounced 8.1 percent higher, and second, when squashed with a 100-pound load, the 1953 ball compressed 7.4 percent less. Ward estimated that the aging factor deadened the 1952 ball by 1 percent at most—so in other words, the new ball was significantly harder and livelier. Proving him right, the number of home runs increased by 22 percent. And in other news, the Wiffle Ball was invented.

  1954 In December 1954, the rule that required the ball to meet resiliency standards was eliminated. The composition of the ball, however, became more clearly defined, and the now-famous clause about the ball being “a sphere formed by yarn wound around a small core of cork” was added to the rule book.

  1955 Rawlings was bought out by Spalding and began manufacturing baseballs in St. Louis.

  (Photo Credit 6.7)

  1956 Prior to a Spring Training game in Wichita, Kansas, the White Sox and Cardinals played around with a new invention called the Glo-bal. This novelty baseball, which glowed even during the day and was supposedly easier to see, was a hit with the players, but never found its way into an actual game. During the regular season, visibility wasn’t a problem as the National and American Leagues each hit more than 1,000 home runs for the first time ever. Of course, this got the media riled up for another juiced-ball controversy, and the manufacturers and league executives denied responsibility. In May 1956, Spalding vice president George Dawson met with Warren Giles, then the president of the National League, and issued the following statement: “Mr. Giles said he had reports that there was more jackrabbit in the ball. I informed him that the 1956 baseball is being made of the same materials we have been using for a long, long time.” In early June, scientists at the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia conducted a series of experiments that proved that the 1956 ball wasn
’t livelier than the 1955 ball. On June 22, 1956, the National League issued a press release titled “Lively Ball?—Bunk!—Why not give slugger his due!” The release urged people to stop complaining about lively balls, and it suggested that there were simply more power hitters than in the old days. “Players are NOT hitting MORE home runs,” it said. “MORE players are hitting home runs!” The press release pointed out the fact that players had gotten bigger over the past 20 years: in 1956 the average first baseman was 6-foot-2½ and 203 pounds—3 inches taller and 24 pounds heavier than the typical first baseman in 1936. Players at every position were bigger, including pitchers, who were throwing harder than ever before. The league claimed, “It’s axiomatic that the faster a pitch is thrown, the farther it will travel upon impact.”

  1958 Harwood & Sons published its own newsletter and facetiously claimed to have “used sufficient materials during its one hundred year operation to use the world as a core and make a giant baseball of it.” The company shipped baseballs to all 48 states of the continental United States, as well as to the Arctic region and U.S. armed forces bases all over the world. The average major league team used roughly 700 dozen balls this season, and Spalding began winding them in a temperature- and humidity-controlled environment. The inside of each ball contained enough material to circle the bases three times: 121 yards of course gray yarn, 45 yards of smoother white wool, 53 yards of fine gray wool, and 150 yards of fine white cotton.

  1961 The juiced-ball controversy intensified as Roger Maris took aim at Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. In early August 1961, Spalding president Edwin L. Parker tried to settle the issue with a 1,500-word statement. It didn’t work. “Don’t tell me it isn’t a rabbit ball,” said Reds pitcher Jim Brosnan. “I can hear it squealing every time it goes over the fence.” Hall of Famer Satchel Paige agreed, adding, “It’s livelier, all right. No two ways about it. That’s why you have to be careful when you’re handling it.” On August 14, 1961, the New York Times published a 3,200-word article called “ ’61 Ball May (or May Not) Account for Homers.” The newspaper had arranged for a group of chemical engineers from Foster D. Snell, Inc., to test three different baseballs—one from 1927 (when Ruth had set the record), another from 1936, and a third from 1961—and as the title of the article suggests, the results were inconclusive. But hey, at least the engineers tried. They had used a “vernier caliper” to measure compressibility and an “explosive-driven Remington Arms Ram” to shoot the balls in the air (in Central Park) in order to test the rebound coefficient. They had also dissected the balls and recruited a “rubber technologist” to study the innards. Snell’s director of engineering concluded that the 1961 ball was slightly larger, lighter, and livelier than the 1927 ball, but he acknowledged that the aging factor might have affected the results. Two weeks later, Sports Illustrated ran a feature story called “YES It’s Livelier—and Here Is the Proof.” Joseph S. Ward and Joseph M. DeSalvo, the guys from Cooper Union who’d tested the balls in 1953, re-created their original experiments with the 1961 ball, thereby eliminating the aging factor. They claimed that the new ball was 2 percent livelier (an increase that would’ve added six feet to a 300-foot fly ball) and 8 percent harder. Ward and DeSalvo also reported that the average 1961 ball, weighing in at 5.29 ounces, was heavier than the rule book specifications permitted. Commissioner Ford Frick denounced their findings. “I haven’t the slightest doubt that the ball has been the same year after year after year,” he said. “The Spalding people would not make a change in the ball without an order from me. I have issued no such directive.” On August 29, 1961, Parker appeared at a news conference and declared, “Today’s ball and the one that Ruth hit are identical. Period.” Spalding’s chief seamstress, a 49-year-old woman named Beryl Gauthier who hadn’t even heard of Roger Maris, said, “The ball is just the same as it ever was.”