Sport: Same Old Ball

The regular midsummer meeting of the National League has settled, once and for all, accurately and scientifically, the cause of the excessive heavy batting of the past few years, and the exact status of the so-called “lively” ball. This has proven not at all a “lively” ball, and therefore not the cause of the excessive batting or of the prevalent home run craze.

—Reach Official

American League Guide, 1926

A quarter-century later, the lively ball argument is as lively as ever, and its proponents are multiplying. “Don’t tell me it isn’t a rabbit ball,” says Cincinnati Pitcher Jim Brosnan. “I can hear it squealing every time it goes over the fence.” The Chicago White Sox’s veteran Early Wynn, 41, agrees: “Cut the ball open and you’ll find a carburetor.”

In this year’s heavy barrage from the batter’s box, those who hold the rabbit ball responsible point in triumph to the evidence. With more than a month to go, the major-league sluggers have poled 2,094 balls into home-run territory—a figure that, extended to season’s end, will set a record. For the first time, Babe Ruth’s durable record of 60 home runs, set in 1927, is threatened by two men: Yankee Sluggers Mickey Mantle (45 home runs to date) and Roger Maris, who brought his total to 48 last week, with seven home runs in six games. As a clincher, lively ball theorists cite the case of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ skinny shortstop, Maury (“Mighty Mouse”) Wills, who fortnight ago, in his 331st big-league game, and after 1,675 at-bats, hit his first home run.

The fact is that proponents of the rabbit-ball theory had no argument in 1926, and have none now. Says Edwin L. Parker, president of A. G. Spalding Bros., the major leagues’ sole baseball purveyors since 1876: “Today’s ball and the one that Ruth hit are identical. Period.” Nor has the manufacturing process in Spalding’s Chicopee, Mass, factory appreciably changed. Each ball must conform to rigid specifications, set decades ago by the leagues. Its horsehide cover conceals a cork core wrapped in two layers of rubber and 490 machine-wound yards of five kinds of yarn. Even the cover must meet a fine thickness tolerance of .045 to .055 of an inch. The finished ball must weigh in (5 to 5 1/4 oz.) and measure up (9 to 9 1/4: in. around).

Spalding’s assurance that today’s sluggers are hitting the same old ball is confirmed by its chief seamstress. Mrs. Beryl Gauthier, 49. Mrs. Gauthier heads a crew of 75 women who finish the ball-making process by closing the cover seams with exactly 108 double stitches of red yarn. No baseball fan (“Who’s Roger Maris?”), Seamstress Gauthier is firm about her craft: “The ball is just the same as it ever was.”

All of which struck out the rabbit-ball theorists, leaving them to face the unavoidable reality of baseball 1961: the ball is flying into the stands more often simply—and entirely—because the man at bat is hitting it there.