By Walt Hickey Have a wonderful weekend! Mud Industrial Complex When a major league pitcher receives a new baseball that baseball has a shine on it and the texture is just a bit wrong. That’s fixed by rubbing some mud on it, but, no, just any mud: a very specific type of mud collected from an undisclosed location on a tributary of the Delaware River, a unique composition of clay-rich dirt and brackish water that has been the product of one family serving the whole league since the 1950s. All 240,000 major league balls get a mud treatment before going to the field. Each team in the multi-billion dollar league pays Jim Blintliff for four cans of the mud each season at the rate of
Happy Friday. Excellent content as always.