Why are baseballs rubbed with mud

Skip to content. Watch Live. First Alert Weather. First Alert Science School. Gas Prices. Bridging the Great Health Divide. Health Updates. Spot The Signs Opioid Crisis. The product sells mostly by word of mouth. Bintliff goes out seven or eight times a year for a harvest, driving his pick-up truck from his home in Longport, N. He brings help, he said, and a good harvest can yield as much as 20 five-gallon buckets filled with mud.

I let it age a little bit. The mud is then packaged and sent to ballparks across the country. Skip to content Share Icon. Facebook Logo. Link Icon. They called it Magic Mud, and by the s it was standard for every team to rub it on every single baseball. When Jim was 10, Haas decided that his grandson was ready for his first harvest. The two of them made their way to the secret location on foot and packed mud into a five-gallon camping kettle—the start of a lifetime of mud-work for Jim.

Whatever she saw in him, she was right. Nearly 50 years later—long after his grandfather and father have died, after siblings have moved far away—Bintliff has never wanted to leave New Jersey, never wanted to quit the business.

Good mud needs to mature. It needs to be cleansed. When he brings the stuff back to his house, he first runs it through a strainer, removing any twigs or leaves. Then, it has to sit. Mud is mixed with the right amount of water and deposited into bins the size of trash cans.

Over the course of five or six weeks Bintliff will siphon off excess liquid and rerun the mud through the strainer. Finally, the water will have fully drained, and the mud should be ready. It will feel more like cold cream than pudding, with any trace of grit removed. Mix a dollop with a tiny bit of water or spit, as some equipment managers do , and it will be just perfect for rubbing up a baseball.

Bintliff now has a modest backyard, just enough room to fit four mud bins at a reasonable distance from a small patio table. Instead, they had to store the mud inside—and the only space large enough was the laundry room, which, despite the practicality of its tiled floor, is hardly where anyone might want to keep giant containers of mud for weeks at a time.

Bintliff had told her about the family business only just before their wedding; at the time, his father still owned the company, but all the work of harvesting had been passed on to him. They were legally wed, yes, but sharing the specifics of the family secret represented an entirely different kind of intimacy for Jim.

But after five years of marriage, and the birth of two daughters, he took her out to see the mud at last. Please note our new address and phone numbers! For nearly three quarters of a century, a special variety of Jersey muck, Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, has been removing the sheen from baseballs for just about every professional baseball team in the country.

It all began in when an umpire complained to Lena Blackburne, a third base coach for the old Philadelphia Athletics, about the sorry condition of the baseballs used by the American League. Back then a ball was prepped simply with mud made of water and dirt from the playing field. The result? The ball's cover was too soft, leaving it open for tampering.

Something was needed to take off the shine but not soften the cover. Blackburne took on the challenge. Next time he returned to his home in Burlington County, he checked out the mud along tributaries of the Delaware River until he found some muck the whereabouts of the mud hole is still a dark secret with a texture he felt would do the job.