Every Baseball Is Rubbed with This Special Mud Before It Gets Used

Baseball , America ’s past past fourth dimension , is a pretty quirky game with quirkier players and quirkiest traditions . cud tobacco ! Sunflower seeds ! exchange caps ! Seventh Inning Stretch ! And even a “ special clay ” that gets rubbed onto every single baseball game in the major and minor league . Huh ?

The mud is called Lena Blackburne Original Baseball Rubbing Mud and it come from a surreptitious pip in South Jersey off the Delaware River . Jim Bintliff , who owns Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud , skim over the top column inch level on the muddy riverside for compendium and then puts the mud through screens to refine it before package it , get on it and shipping it to all the baseball squad in the MLB . Bintliff says the texture of his special mud is like chocolate pudding . Tasty .

The clay is apply because unexampled baseballs are much too silken for pitchers to grip by rights . baseball game terminate up using Lena Blackburne ’s especial clay because its fine - grain sediments holding tot up grip without scratching the leather and messing up a ballock ’s trajectory . The custom of manually rubbing this exceptional clay into balls started in the 1950 ’s and continues to this day . [ NewsWorks ]