Long before I was a golfer, summertime meant baseball season. As a young kid my parents first enrolled me in soccer. What were they thinking? Not for me. The next year I played t-ball and that was more like it. I moved up to baseball underage and played with the older kids. I am not the tallest of people now and at that age I wasn't either. As a youngster I was pretty easy to spot on the diamond. I was the kid with his uniform passed his knees playing with kids 2-3 years older and nearly a foot taller. My parents spent weekends playing slow-pitch. You may have noticed in my last post that they passed that down to me. As a kid some of my fondest memories are running after foul balls at slow-pitch tournaments with the other kids. The kid who brought back the foul ball was often given a quarter to spend on candy at the concession stand. My first after school job was taking care of the town ball diamonds. One of my most embarrassing moments as a young teenager was when I crashed the tractor as I was floating the infield. There was a girls softball tournament in town and a particularly good looking team was changing in the dougout. I may have gotten slightly distracted :P.
Well now that I have ranted on about my childhood, on to the technical part. You see similar to my previous golf ball story, one of the best parts as a kid growing up at the ball diamonds was finding a ball with the cover partially ripped off. Similar to a golf ball the inside of a baseball is composed of a rubber ball type core and covered with wound up wool material. The cover is made from cowhide. Similar to baseball bats the baseball hasn't gone through many changes throughout history. Perhaps this is one of the reasons that baseball is considered America's pastime and such a nostalgic sport; the game hasn't changed much over the years.
A major league baseball consists of a rubber/cork core called a "pill". The pill is is composed of an inner cushioned cork ball with a 13/16" diameter. The cork is encased by a two layers of rubber, a black inner layer and a red outer layer. The entire pill measures 4 1/8" in circumference. There are four layers of wool and poly/cotton wound threads that surround the inner "pill". Wool is selected as the material for this layer due to its natural resiliency and memory. This allows the ball to regain its perfectly round shape shortly after being hit and compressed by the bat.
Finally the outer cover is made from Number One Grade, alum-tanned full grain cow hide. This is the only significant change in the ball over the years. In 1974 due to a shortage of horses, the outer layer changed from horsehide to cowhide. The cover is stitched together with 88 inches of waxed red thread.
If you're like me and grew up around the baseball diamonds then you most likely ripped apart an old baseball and got down to the inner core. If you haven't then at least you now know what's inside.
In the last post I showed a clip from one of my favorite baseball movies The Natural. This time I show a clip from my favorite baseball movie and one of my favorite movies of all time Field of Dreams:
Sean
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