Western Pennsylvania dirt is used in the infields of most MLB stadiums (2017)
post-gazette.com
post-gazette.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/26/sports/baseball/baseball-...
Considering over 1,140,000 (2019 figures[0]) balls get used through the season (not even including practice and playoff balls), it's an astounding amount of mud rubbing action.
[0] https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/1171328/2019/08/29/what-you...
Seems kinda sad, it'd be cool if the MLB kept it real by diverting a small amount of profit to make sure public schools had legit baseballs to train the next generation with.
They could market the fuck out of this, too. Why aren't these MLB exdecs a tad more creative?
Such claims with zero scientific evidence do add a dimension of mystique and lore, which may draw some folks in.
As I understand it, in professional baseball, it is the job of the umpires to this use mud to take the sheen off of new balls, pre-game.
The mud itself is for sale, and has been for a very long time: https://www.baseballrubbingmud.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Sc...
There is nothing here to be sad or outraged about. There is no scarcity or exclusivity here.
Nothing but a small amount of money and mutual agreement on a procedural change prevents anyone from getting some of this same mud from the same source and having their own umpires in their own [kid or adult] league do the same thing for new baseballs.
Or: There is nothing that prevents a person from buying some of this mud and using it to pre-process baseballs, and -- as you say -- marketing the fuck out of it.
Brand new equipment out of the box sucks, but if you let equipment managers bring out old balls than there is going to be wild variations between every different ball used. So having a consistent break-in process is pretty important.
You should see the kind of shenanigans they do in the football world: https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/4136154/2023/01/31/nfl-kick...
Assuming the oft-cited Delaware River and Palmyra references are genuine, no, Blackburne Rubbing Mud does not own any public property in Palmyra. Blackburne's registered address is 60 miles away. There's about a mile of riverfront on a public park, an industrial warehouse, and some condos.
He's stealing the mud from public property. I'm sure that he'd be arrested if he showed up with an excavator and tried to start a gravel pit on a nature trail, but, it turns out, you can boast on national media about taking dirt from a public park if you only take a couple hundred pounds of it a year and do it sneakily, two bucketfuls at a time.
Instead I'm guessing it has something to do with how they process it?
That would be like a bakery asking McDonald's how much sugar they put in their buns. If everyone could do it, they'd be out of business.
Their competitive advantage has nothing to do (or at least extremely little) with recipe trade secrets. Any professional test kitchen could reproduce any McDonald's item within weeks
And yet the milk we locals buy in the supermarket (which I am sure is the same as our exports) is milk that has been divided into its core elements (fat sugar protein) and the recombined in a certain ratio.
New Zealand milk does not come from a cow, and I would think PA dirt baseball fields do not come from the ground, but rather PA has the right raw ingredients at hand.
On a side now people here pay a premium for “raw milk” (unpasteurised straight from a cow).
I love that.
I've read that the Romans used to import arena sand from a certain area in North Africa because it was somehow better than the local sand. I think it was also used in upscale athletic facilities as well.