Saturday, June 26, 2004

Baseballs

I'm not planning on doing the blog-as-list-of-links thing (though I'm aware that's the original purpose -- mine would all be stolen from the blogs that I list down the side of the page anyway, which would be a bit pointless) but I want to share one or two...

In particular, "What's That Stuff?" via John Scalzi has a biography of the baseball that I personally find fascinating. Did you know Rawlings now has a baseball, for pitching practice only, which has its own built-in radar gun and LCD display? Or even better, that "MLB's official game-ball preparation calls for umpires to rub the balls with Lena Blackburne's Rubbing Mud, which one representative of the Major League Umpire's Association describes as smooth and creamy, but with a fine grit. The composition of the mud is a closely held proprietary secret, but the base ingredient is known to be mud from a specific site in a tributary of the Delaware River."

Isn't that great?

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