The Baseball

by Zack Hample

  It’s noisy inside the winding room, a constant whirring and hissing of mechanical parts. Many employees wear protective headphones, and some also use surgical masks to guard against the faint smell of fumes. The fumes come from the pills, which are coated with a latex adhesive in order to help the first layer of yarn stick.

  Here comes the really cool part.

  At each work station, the employee at the first machine wraps the end of the yarn around the pill and places it on a tiny platform with a narrow opening at the back. Then, with the push of a button, the pill twirls furiously as the machine pulls yarn all around it from a spool below. Within seconds, the pill gets covered with a one-inch-thick layer of four-ply gray yarn, and the machine shuts itself off automatically.2 The employee then cuts the yarn, weighs the center on a digital scale, and measures its circumference with a thin, metal tape ruler.

  Each phase of the winding process has its own specifications, and the parameters are astonishingly small. After the first layer, the weight of the center must not vary more than .02 ounces. In case you’re bad at math, that’s 1/50 of an ounce, and the specs get even tighter from there; after each of the outer three layers, the margin of error shrinks to 1/100 of an ounce. Meanwhile, the circumference of the first two layers can vary as much as 1/32 of an inch, and the outer two layers have a slightly bigger target at 1/16 of an inch.

  Cross section of a major league baseball (Photo Credit 7.4)

  The measurements aren’t always perfect right away, but that’s not a problem. If, after any of the four winding phases, the center weighs a fraction of an ounce too much, the employee snips a tiny piece of yarn off the end and puts the ball back on the scale. This is actually a common occurrence, so by the end the day, each employee is left with a bucket of useless yarn clippings.

  Then there’s the issue of yarn tension.

  “If you wind something at zero tension, it’s gonna feel like a sponge,” said Cotter. “If you wind something very tight, it’s gonna be rock solid, so we want to get between those two and be as consistent as possible.”

  Therefore, each work station has a computerized Tension Meter that monitors the force with which the yarn and thread get pulled from the spools. It’s basically a small black box with four digital displays. The meter is programmed to shut down the machines if the tension—measured in grams—slips outside the parameters, but that hardly ever happens.

  Finally, there’s an inspector who brings his own scale and tape measure into the room once a day. He randomly selects a center from each machine and charts the measurements. Then, after the data is processed, the employees receive personalized graphs with the results so they can see how they’re doing.

  THE COWHIDE

  Let’s get something straight: cows are not killed to make baseballs. They’re killed because people like to eat them, so don’t accuse MLB of animal cruelty. One of the many by-products that comes from cows just happens to be the hide, and there’s a company called Tennessee Tanning that prepares it exclusively for Rawlings.

  Tanning an animal hide is a complex process. There’s bacteria to be killed, fat and muscle tissue to be scraped off, and hair to be removed as well. The hide gets cured and soaked with a whole lot of chemicals, and in Rawlings’s case, it has to be whitened with a potent aluminum-sulfate compound. It also has to be cut horizontally (like a bagel would be sliced) in order to achieve the proper thickness. MLB’s specs require the cowhide to measure between .046 and .056 inches—a differential of 1/100 of an inch—and only the outer part gets used on the balls.

  By the time the cowhide arrives in Costa Rica, it doesn’t even look like cowhide. It comes in bed-sized sheets of dryish white leather, often bearing imperfections that make certain areas unusable. There are wrinkles, stretch marks, rough patches, and sometimes more specific flaws; if a cow bumps into a barbed wire fence or gets bitten by a tick, the hide will have a blemish that must be avoided. Employees carefully work around these spots with two pieces of equipment. The first is a small hydraulic press that hovers two inches above a sturdy countertop. The second is kind of like a figure-eight-shaped cookie cutter with 108 prongs around the inner edge.

  At each of the five work stations, an employee places the cutter on the hide, presses a couple buttons to lower the press—and that’s it. The result is a perfectly formed figure-eight piece of cowhide with 108 stitch holes conveniently punched in place.3

  The soon-to-be baseball covers are then weighed and manually stamped with a six-letter code. Cut open any ball and you’ll see it. It’s Rawlings’s secret method of tracking the date and leather batch in case there were ever a problem. The covers are also measured for thickness—there’s a machine that can shave them slightly thinner if necessary—and fed through small metallic rollers that apply an adhesive on the underside. This helps the leather stick to the center of the ball. Finally, in order to make the cowhide more pliable during the stitching process, the covers get rolled up in damp towels and stored in coolers.

  A small strip of cowhide beside the hydraulic press; note the figure-eight-shaped cutouts. (Photo Credit 7.5)

  The tool that cuts the figure-eight pieces from the cowhide; note the 108 prongs around the edge. (Photo Credit 7.6)

  THE STITCHING PROCESS

  You would not believe how hard it is to stitch a baseball, so consider this: it’s so hard that machines can’t even do it. The thread can tear or get tangled. The cowhide can get scratched or smudged. The sewing needles can break or stab you if you’re not careful. And even without these mishaps, there’s the challenge of getting the first stitch started—and then hiding the last one from sight. For a new trainee, it can take an hour to stitch a ball that won’t ever leave the factory; for experienced employees, it takes about 14 minutes, and even then there’s no guarantee that it’ll pass the first inspection.

  The stitching room is huge, about as big as a large gymnasium. It has to be, because 350 people work there—actually a bit more if you count the supervisors and inspectors and material handlers. The room has a slanted tin roof that measures 23 feet high at its peak. There are low-hanging fluorescent lights and dozens of industrial-strength fans mounted above the work area on exposed metal beams.

  It’s a raw space with a no-nonsense atmosphere and pleasant conditions. There’s no dress code. The stitchers are allowed to wear headphones and listen to music. And because the stitching process is strenuous, the factory employs a full-time safety and health engineer who guides the workers through a stretching program every morning.

  The stitching room (Photo Credit 7.7)

  “Every person also gets their chair modified according to their size and build,” said Cotter. “You’ll see some that are different heights. It’s because that person is different.”

  The chairs are arranged classroom-style in 14 rows of 25. Each one has a small desk attached to the front, along with a vise that clamps the ball in place. To get the first stitch started, the needles get poked through the center and pulled up through the first two stitch holes in order to anchor the cover. The strenuous part has to do with making the stitches tight; with one needle in each hand, the stitcher yanks his (or her!) arms back like a butterfly opening its wings, except the motion is much more violent. It’s almost as if he’s trying to smack two people who are peeking over his shoulders. And then he does it 107 more times, pausing every so often to rub the thread with a small block of wax so it won’t slacken and get tangled.

  The last stitch is executed much like the first. With help from a pair of pliers, the needles get pushed through the center and tugged back out through the seam. It might sound easy, but this maneuver requires great precision. Don’t forget how narrow the seam is. It’s really just a hairline gap between the two pieces of leather, so if the stitcher’s aim were even 1/16 of an inch off, the tip of the needle would puncture the cover and render the entire ball worthless.

  This happens on occasion. Roughly half of 1 percent of all the balls get scrapped for various re
asons, and that’s okay. Rawlings understands that human error is part of the process, and yet the company still strives for perfection. That’s why there are so many quality control checks—and why the most talented stitchers get rewarded.

  “The more you make, the more you get paid,” said Cotter. “That’s how we motivate them.”

  In addition to their base salary (which is slightly above the minimum wage), the stitchers earn per-ball bonuses if they complete more than 160 within a single week. Those who reach the 175-ball plateau can stop work for the week and still get paid as if they were there—or they can keep stitching and continue to earn bonuses for as many as 200 balls. Every week, approximately 30 percent of the stitchers make it that far, at which point they get sent home with full paychecks.

  Quality, of course, is more important than quantity; once a ball is completed, it has to pass three different visual inspections, starting with a quick glance in the stitching room.

  The 350 stitchers are grouped into seven teams of 50. Each team has a material handler (who provides the centers and covers) and an inspector (who constantly roams the floor). Whenever a stitcher completes a ball, he places it in a plastic bag hanging from the side of his desk. After a bunch of balls have accumulated, the inspector collects them. If a ball has a defect that can easily be fixed, he’ll hand it back to the stitcher. If a ball looks good, he’ll stamp it with invisible ink, toss it in a barrel, and punch a ticket to track the stitcher’s productivity.

  FINISHING TOUCHES

  Don’t let the title of this section fool you. The balls still have a long way to go, and it starts in a small room called “the racks.” As soon as the balls are brought in from the stitching room, they get dumped onto a dropcloth covering a wooden table with raised edges. Two inspectors then carefully examine every single ball for these six correctable flaws:

  Beginning and End Stitches If they’re visible, that’s a problem.

  Misaligned Stitch Every double-stitch must meet in the middle to form a perfect V shape.

  Borders The two cowhide pieces can’t overlap or have too much space between them.

  Loose Stitch Every stitch must be pulled tight (but not too tight because that causes other problems).

  Incorrect Method For every stitch, the left-hand needle must be poked through the hole first, followed by the right-hand needle.

  Straight Stitch The stitches must form Vs, not straight lines across the seam.

  The inspectors have six rolls of stickers hanging above their table, each with a different number that corresponds to the six flaws. Whenever they spot a flaw, they place the appropriate sticker beside it and send the ball to the nearby black light station. Remember the invisible ink? Every stitcher has a stamp with a personalized code. That’s how the stitching room inspectors mark the balls, and yes, the ink only appears in ultraviolet light.

  The black light worker writes the codes on Post-it notes with regular ink and then, with the notes attached, sends the defective balls back for repair.

  Now, it doesn’t happen often, but the tip of a sewing needle can break off and get lodged beneath the cover. Therefore, the balls that don’t have flaws get passed through a metal detector before being sent to the rolling machine—a clunky yet effective device that sits in a glass case in the corner of the room. Its purpose is simple: make the stitches uniform by pressing them flat. The machine has a solid metal wheel, roughly three feet wide and three inches thick, that spins flat like a frisbee above a wooden platform. The platform has a track, just wide enough for a baseball, that spirals inward toward a hole in the center. In order for the machine to do its thing, an employee needs to feed the balls into it. The balls then get rolled around under 40 pounds of pressure, and after half a minute, they reach the center hole and drop into a plastic crate.

  At this point, the cowhide is still damp so the balls get loaded onto metal racks (hence, the name of the room) to dry overnight.

  Inspectors at work inside “the racks” (Photo Credit 7.8)

  Each rack is a floor-to-ceiling unit with 120 gutterlike rows. Each row is long enough to hold 40 balls. And since there are six racks, there’s way more than enough space for the factory’s daily output.

  Once the balls have dried, they get rolled again and sent to another room for the final inspection. Symmetry, stitch alignment, roundness, color, stains, scars, and even faint traces of insect bites on the cowhide—that’s what the inspectors look for. They also weigh and measure the balls and wipe them with a cleaning solvent to remove any excess wax or oil. (In some cases, the solvent removes the invisible ink as well, so if you examine your own baseballs under a black light and some don’t have the secret code, that’s why.) Finally, the inspectors sort the balls into three categories based solely on their appearance; the balls that make it this far are all within the specs for weight and circumference, so it’s just the minuscule cosmetic defects that determine where they end up. Perfect balls are approved for game use, while those that are ever-so-slightly off will end up in one of two places. They’ll either be designated as practice balls and offered to teams at a discount, or they’ll get sold commercially in retail stores.

  Next stop: the stamping machines. Two of them sit just across the room from the inspectors, and they look rather intense. There are plastic tubes, metal cylinders, and colorful switches and buttons and warning lights. It’s like a maze of robotic parts—a mad scientist’s dream—but the actual stamping process is fairly simple. Each machine has three rubber heads positioned above three different ink plates, and each plate is embossed with a different portion of the logo. (The top portion says “Rawlings,” the one in the middle features the commissioner’s signature, and the bottom section has the MLB silhouette.) Just below the plates sits a cup-shaped holder. An employee has to place a ball there every two seconds. That’s how long it takes for each automated stamping cycle. The heads get lowered to the plates simultaneously. Then they come back up for a split second before going back down to the stamp the ball. Then they come back up. Then they touch the plates. Then they come back up. Then they stamp the ball. Then the plates. Then the ball. Plates. Ball. Plates. Ball. Get the picture? The machine is programmed to operate at that pace, so the challenge lies in keeping up with it and positioning the balls just right. If the employee doesn’t place a ball in time, it’s no big deal. The stamping heads will simply come down and whiff, and the cycle proceeds uninterrupted. Meanwhile, a second employee removes the freshly stamped balls and places them on a conveyor belt that passes through a heated area. Thirty seconds and 200 degrees Fahrenheit later, the ink is dry.

  The balls are pretty much done after this. All that remains is a grueling two-part testing process in the factory’s quality lab. First, a compression machine tests the hardness of a random sample of balls by measuring how much weight it takes to squash them ¼ of an inch. Second, a pitching machine fires a different batch of balls 85 feet per second against a wall of northern white ash—the same type of wood that most bats are made of. The balls must bounce back at 54.6 percent of the original velocity, plus or minus 3.2 percent. In fancy terms, the rebound speed is known as the “coefficient of restitution” or COR, the key factor in determining how lively the balls are. As a backup, Rawlings conducts these same two tests at a facility in St. Louis, Missouri, as does Major League Baseball at its research center in Lowell, Massachusetts.

  But before the baseballs reach the States, they have to be packaged. This takes place at a long table near the stamping machines. Retail balls are placed in individual plastic cubes, while team balls get wrapped in tissue paper and boxed by the dozen. Then they’re ready to be shipped. From the factory, the balls are trucked to Limón, a province on the eastern coast of Costa Rica. From there they go by boat to Port Everglades, Florida, and by rail to the Rawlings distribution center in Washington, Missouri. After that, it’s just a matter of sending them to teams and stores. On average, a major league baseball will make its way into a game two to three months after l
eaving the factory.

  COMMEMORATIVE BALLS

  Snag a ball at one of Major League Baseball’s premier events and you’ll notice something different about your souvenir: the logo has an artistic flair. Balls from the All-Star Game, Home Run Derby, and World Series—even from regular-season games that take place at first-year stadiums—all have special commemorative designs in place of the standard MLB logo. Howard Smith, the senior vice president of licensing at Major League Baseball, oversees the design process and granted an exclusive interview for this book:

  Who designs the commemorative logos?

  “Major League Baseball has an in-house design department that works with the particular Club to design the ball, with input coming from Rawlings as well.”

  How does the process work?

  “Once a specific design is approved, Major League Baseball will work with the Club to decide when and where the baseball will be used. Some baseballs are used on-field during each of a Club’s 81 regular-season home games, while others will appear as a ceremonial first pitch.”

  Are some teams more proactive?

  “I don’t think it’s really a question of being proactive. Each Club might just have different ideas of exactly how they wish to celebrate these events or achievements. For example, one Club might choose a commemorative baseball while another goes the route of an on-field ceremony.”

  How far in advance do you start planning the logos?

  “It’s never too early to start planning for a given year, but we do require that the Clubs submit an approved logo prior to the start of Spring Training.”