If Lugo gets a ball with a mark on it, he said, he\u2019ll try to use it as long as he can. But the baseball gods almost never bestow such a gift anymore. As soon as a ball touches dirt, it\u2019s tossed out of play before the next pitch.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s got to be a rule, right? To root out the trickery that crafty pitchers once mastered?<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, no, it\u2019s not automatic,\u201d said Marvin Hudson, an MLB umpire since 1998. \u201cIf it hits the dirt, catchers will throw it out quicker than I would. If they hand it back to me, I look at it, and if it\u2019s not scuffed, I\u2019ll wipe it off and keep it in my ball bag. But players are a lot different than they were back when I first came in, as far as what type of ball they want. It\u2019s kind of comical, to be honest with you.\u201d<\/p>\n
Watch a ballgame today \u2013 really watch it \u2013 and you\u2019ll be amazed at how often the pitchers, catchers and umpires change the ball. Just how many does it take to get through a game? It\u2019s like trying to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar. You can\u2019t tell on TV, because the ball isn\u2019t always on the screen. And you can\u2019t tell in person unless you commit to looking solely at the ball the entire time.<\/p>\n
So that\u2019s what I did. Twice this summer \u2014 on July 22 in Philadelphia and August 11 in the Bronx \u2014 I tracked the fate of every baseball used in the game.<\/p>\n
The first lasted only one pitch, by the Phillies\u2019 Cristopher S\u00e1nchez, who induced a ground out from Rob Refsnyder of the Boston Red Sox. As the Phillies made the play, plate umpire Edwin Jim\u00e9nez reached into his ball bag and lobbed another ball to S\u00e1nchez.<\/p>\n
The infielders tossing the out around the horn might as well have been pallbearers. This one\u2019s useful life was over. Third baseman Otto Kemp tossed the ball to the home dugout, where an MLB authenticator labeled it with a hologram, bound for sale in a kiosk behind section 133 at Citizens Bank Park.<\/p>\n
Both of the games were fairly ordinary: The Phillies beat the Red Sox, 4-1, and the Yankees beat the Minnesota Twins, 6-2. They were both night games, outdoors on grass, with no precipitation. Eleven pitchers combined to throw 508 pitches \u2013 249 in Philly, 259 in New York \u2013 while using 202 different baseballs.<\/p>\n
That comes out to 2.51 pitches per ball, right in line with MLB\u2019s official data from the last few seasons: 2.60 in 2023, 2.52 in 2024 and 2.44 this season through August 20th.<\/p>\n
Pitchers tend to know this without being told. Ask a pitcher to guess the lifespan of a baseball, and he\u2019ll almost always nail the answer.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d say the average life expectancy is less than three (pitches), slightly above two \u2013 and it didn\u2019t used to be like that,\u201d said Boston\u2019s Liam Hendriks, 36, who started his pro career in the Gulf Coast League in 2007.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a couple dozen balls for a GCL game. Any time a ball was in play and it was fielded, you\u2019d use that ball unless you asked for a new one. And if you were a starting pitcher that wasn\u2019t pitching that day, you had to chase down the foul balls.\u201d<\/p>\n Things were similarly loose in the college game. Milwaukee Brewers manager Pat Murphy, who spent 22 years coaching Notre Dame and Arizona State through 2009, said umpires very rarely changed out the balls.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d stick a road apple in there when the guy asked for balls \u2013 you did that sometimes, slip in an old BP ball just for fun,\u201d Murphy said. \u201cYou knew the budgets were always tight. A big slice on the ball, they\u2019d change it out. Other than that, no way.\u201d<\/p>\n For decades, this is how it was in the major leagues, too. Oversight of the game\u2019s foundational object was not a priority.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Don Mincher was our first baseman, if I had a guy up like Bubba Phillips, who was a notorious first-ball hitter, they\u2019d throw the ball around the infield and Minch would come over to the mound and I\u2019d say, \u2018Give me the infield ball,\u2019\u201d said Hall of Famer Jim Kaat, who pitched from 1959 to 1983. \u201cI\u2019d give him the game ball and he\u2019d throw it in the dugout. So the first ball I threw was the infield ball with all the grass stains on it.\u201d<\/p>\n Coaches from that era would pass down the dark arts to the next generation. Mel Stottlemyre, a contemporary of Kaat\u2019s, had pitched with Whitey Ford for the Yankees. Ford loved using scratched baseballs \u2013 he would apply it himself with a specially designed ring, or have the catcher, Elston Howard, subtly drag the ball across a metal buckle on his shin guards.<\/p>\n \u201cWhitey was a master, and Mel was a master, too,\u201d said David Cone, who pitched on staffs coached by Stottlemyre with the Mets and Yankees. \u201cThe trick he taught me was to keep the ball in your hand when you go down and grab the rosin bag, then touch the ball to the ground and you get a little dirt on it. You\u2019d have a little sweat on the ball so the dirt would stick. He could make the ball dance and sink naturally with just a couple of pebbles of dirt.\u201d<\/p>\n Cone, who pitched from 1986 to 2003, learned the perils of this about halfway through his career. One afternoon in 1995, pitching for the Toronto Blue Jays in Oakland, Cone got a ball with a scuff in the perfect spot: the middle of the leather, on the wide opening between the seams of the horseshoe.<\/p>\n He put the scuff on the left side and gripped it like a sinker, knowing the ball\u2019s right side \u2013 now heavier than the left \u2013 would naturally shift away from the blemish. And it did, much more than he intended.<\/p>\n \u201cIt just went vroooom \u2013 shot up and hit Mark McGwire right in the helmet,\u201d Cone said. \u201cSent him to the hospital and knocked him out of the All-Star Game. That\u2019s when I said, \u2018Oh s\u2014, I\u2019ve got to be a little more careful here.\u2019 Scared the hell out of me. That\u2019s when I stopped doing a lot of that.\u201d<\/p>\n Cone\u2019s awakening roughly coincided with a shift in attitude about the supply of baseballs for any given game. Until returning from the 1994-95 strike, when teams were eager to repair fan relations, MLB discouraged players from giving balls to fans. Memos posted in clubhouses warned that fans could be injured, but teams were also just stingy with the supply.<\/p>\n \u201cThey were counting every baseball and reusing things \u2013 and don\u2019t take this in a bad light, but we weren\u2019t pushed to make it a fan-friendly experience,\u201d said Jamie Moyer, who pitched from 1986 to 2012. \u201cRight now it\u2019s fan-friendly. If you can give away all the balls, go ahead, give them all away!\u201d<\/p>\n That\u2019s the illusion, anyway.<\/p>\n Once the game starts, if a staffer down the foul lines tosses a ball into the crowd \u2013 or a player does it, as they do at the end of almost every half-inning \u2013 it\u2019s OK. And if a player in the dugout snatches a foul ball and holds onto it, nobody\u2019s going to take it from him.<\/p>\n Almost every other ball goes to the MLB authenticator, who sits by a little tabletop in the corner of (or adjacent to) the home dugout. Once each ball is logged and labeled, it is ready to be sold; prices at a recent Phillies game ranged from $39.99 for a ball pitched by the visitors (and not put in play) to $199.99 for an RBI double hit by a Phillie.<\/p>\n Some balls, however, are priceless. S\u00e1nchez was at his best on July 22, spinning the third complete game of his career. He was so efficient in the 1-2-3 ninth that he used the same ball for all 10 pitches: two balls, seven strikes and one line out. He kept it as a souvenir to be displayed back home in the Dominican Republic.<\/p>\n \u201cI have a wall where I have all my accomplishments, my complete games, the All-Star Game accolades last year, and a Pitcher of the Month award, too,\u201d S\u00e1nchez said through an interpreter. \u201cIt\u2019s something that I use to motivate myself.<\/p>\n Many years ago, another Phillies pitcher wrote a children\u2019s book<\/a> from the perspective of a baseball. Tug McGraw, an impish lefty with a vivid imagination, created a character named \u201cLumpy\u201d who dreams of the Hall of Fame but frets at his long odds.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m still here in this box, right?\u201d Lumpy says to himself before a game. \u201cMaybe I won\u2019t even get to play. I might end up in the batting cage. I might end up in some ump\u2019s duffel bag as a surprise for his kid. Who knows?\u201d<\/p>\n Little Lumpy \u2013 who winds up as a would-be grand slam that twists foul \u2013 was right to worry about his chances. Baseballs arrive at the ballpark in cases of 72 boxes, with each box holding a dozen balls. That\u2019s 864 balls in a case. The Phillies estimate that their storage room holds somewhere between 36 and 48 such cases. If it\u2019s four dozen, that means more than 40,000 baseballs waiting to be used.<\/p>\n The mud itself has a charming baseball backstory. It is named for Lena Blackburne<\/a>, a light-hitting infielder from the 1910s, and still sifted from the same spot. Here\u2019s how The New York Times\u2019 Dan Barry once explained its origin<\/a>:<\/p>\n While coaching third base for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1938, (Blackburne) heard an umpire complain about the struggle to prepare brand-new balls for use. Blackburne experimented with mud from a Delaware River tributary, not far from his New Jersey home, and found that it de-glossed the ball while mostly maintaining its whiteness.<\/p>\n Pitchers commonly added their own gripping agents \u2013 illegally, but effectively \u2013 until MLB banned so-called \u201csticky stuff\u201d<\/a> in 2021, with umpires checking pitchers\u2019 hands and equipment. A year later, the league mandated humidor storage in every park and formalized the entire ball-preparation process.<\/p>\n After finding that rubbing techniques differed from team to team, the league sent a memo instructing attendants to \u201capply mud in uniform manner, ensuring the same mud-to-water ratio is applied to each ball\u201d as they knead it into the leather for 30 seconds apiece.<\/p>\n The presence of gameday inspectors \u2013 one in the home clubhouse, one in the visiting clubhouse and a rover \u2013 was part of MLB\u2019s response to the Houston Astros\u2019 sign-stealing scandal, which The Athletic exposed in 2019<\/a>. Gone are the days when a starting pitcher could persuade the clubhouse guys to rub the ball to his preferences.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019d go back and forth with Edgar,\u201d said Moyer, referring to Edgar Mart\u00ednez, his Seattle teammate and a hitting savant. \u201cHe wanted to see the seams, and the darker ball made it harder for him to see the seams. But I liked the darker ball. So we made a little adaptation: the days I pitched, I got the darker ball. And the days that I didn\u2019t pitch, he got the lighter ball.\u201d<\/p>\n These days, a laminated display in every humidor shows the three types of shades for a ball: light, target and dark. Each ball should fall between target and dark. A batch that\u2019s too dark would never make it into a game.<\/p>\n \u201cMLB follows a solid guideline,\u201d said Tim Schmidt, a Phillies clubhouse attendant since 2022. \u201cIf a pitcher says, \u2018I want them dark,\u2019 we\u2019re not doing dark. He might want them dark, but what about the pitcher on the other side? It\u2019s got to be fair. So they keep it to a standard. Usually the rejects are pretty obvious.\u201d<\/p>\n Each approved ball cannot be used for any other game; if it sees no action, it can be sold as \u201cgame-ready\u201d or sent to the bullpen bag. Batting-practice balls are fresh from the box \u2013 pearls, they\u2019re called. Easily thrown, easily seen.<\/p>\n Twice in the games we tracked, a batter hit a ball that touched only grass, not dirt, and was kept in play. Two other times, a catcher dropped the ball while transferring it from his glove to his bare hand; those balls also survived.<\/p>\n But basically, every ball that\u2019s hit or pitched into the dirt will be removed, and every foul ball that doesn\u2019t end up with a fan or a player goes right to the authenticator. And don\u2019t even think about the old trick of the catcher short-hopping the ball to second base after the final warm-up toss.<\/p>\n \u201cIf that ball bounces to the ground when they send it down, everybody knows, \u2018Hey, here comes a new one,\u2019\u201d umpire Ron Kulpa said. \u201cEverybody\u2019s dialed into that.\u201d<\/p>\n The fresh ball pitchers get each inning might have a bit of dirt on it, though, depending on where it stops when the umpire rolls it out. And, yes, the umps are keenly aware that some fans pay special attention to that with \u201cmound ball\u201d wagers<\/a> in the stands.<\/p>\n \u201cYou try to get it as close to the rubber as you can,\u201d Hudson said. \u201cWe\u2019ve had guys that\u2019ll walk it out and just set it on top of the rubber for that inning, just so somebody wins. But it doesn\u2019t go unnoticed. Fans play it. I\u2019ve had friends come to spring training, they\u2019ll sit there and bet amongst themselves about it, trying to see (if we) can get it to the mound. I\u2019m like, \u2018You guys gotta get a life!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n We\u2019ve all seen a pitcher get the umpire\u2019s attention, hold the ball aloft and shake it lightly. It\u2019s the universal signal for a new ball, followed by a soft toss to a bat boy and a fresh delivery from the ump.<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/pitchperballs_NYY_PHI_stadiums_v2.png\")
<\/a><\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/MLB_Ballsused-total2024_v2.png\")
<\/a>To be game-ready, though, the balls must be stored for two weeks, untouched, in a humidor set to 70 degrees at 54 percent relative humidity. Three hours before each game, clubhouse attendants apply a mixture of water and mud to 192 balls (16 dozen), which are then inspected by an MLB gameday compliance monitor. Fourteen dozen approved balls, or 168, must be available for each game.<\/p>\n![\"\"\/](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/Ball_mudding.png\")
<\/p>\n