What's up with all them balls?
all sorts of ball sports
Happy Friday! This post is an 11-minute read.
Have you ever seen a game of basketball and wondered, “why is the ball orange?” Or maybe you’ve seen a game of baseball and thought, “that thing got mud on it?” Perhaps you saw the 2022 World Cup and wondered which country was making all the balls.
If you identify with any of the above statements, you’re in the right place. If you don’t identify with any of the above statements but you’re thinking to yourself, “you know what? I’m a fun person. I like to do fun things. People usually think I’m pretty easy-going but they don’t know I can get nasty if I need to. Also, I’m trying to learn new things this summer,” then you’re in the right place as well.
If you want to go to your work outing at a minor league baseball game this summer and impress all your colleagues by saying “you know, the reason they use so many balls is because a guy died once” then I cannot stress enough just how much you are in the right place at this very moment.
Okay, that should cover pretty much everyone. Let’s get to learning all the best stuff there is to know about baseballs, basketballs, and soccer balls/footballs:
BASEBALL
It was America’s favorite sport until 1972
Guess how many baseballs the MLB uses in a single game???
Did you guess ten? Well, if by “ten” you meant “ten dozen,” then yes, you are correct. Congratulations!
According to the MLB via The Athletic, an average game of baseball uses between 96 and 120 balls. Similarly, during an average game of baseball, I will eat between 96 and 120 pieces of yummy, yummy popcorn.
If we split the difference and assume 108 baseballs per game, we’re going to see over 260,000 baseballs used during the regular season alone, with postseason, spring training, batting practice, bullpen warmups, and more bringing that tally to nearly one million baseballs per season, every single one of them hand-stitched (in a Costa Rican sweatshop).
To give you some perspective on that number, if you put all the baseballs for a season into five-gallon buckets, assuming 48 balls per bucket, you would need nearly 19,000 buckets to store them all.
To give you some perspective on that number, if you started lining up buckets from home plate at Citi Field (where the Mets play) to home plate at Yankee Stadium (where the Yankees play), you’d need about two seasons to complete the connection (as the crow flies).
Of course, a bunch of those buckets would be underwater and also on the runway at LaGuardia and also at Rikers Island and also the buckets would come within 165 feet of the island where Typhoid Mary was forcibly quarantined for several decades. So maybe don’t do the line thing?
Instead, you could store the balls on top of one of those giant tarps they roll out during rain delays. A full season’s worth of buckets would cover a little over half the tarp, which – can I be honest? – is a lot less than I would have guessed. I think if someone asked me how much of the tarp would be covered, I would have said, overconfidently, “this is probably a trick question, i’m gonna say two full tarps,” and I would have been very wrong.
Disclaimer: I was a political science major so math is actually my weakest suit, but I’m pretty sure I got it right here (famous last words)
But anyway this is all irrelevant because shelves exist. Racks exist.
It hasn’t always been this way. They used to use so many fewer balls. Why? Because balls were expensive!
In 1901, a single baseball cost $1.25, which is about $50 today (about £35 or €40). And team owners decided they actually wanted to make money from this whole baseball thing, so it was not uncommon for the same ball to be used for an entire game, slowly growing darker and darker with dirt, licorice, and tobacco juice.
When balls traveled into the stands, team employees would retrieve them, denying countless old-timey children cool souvenirs, which is actually quite devastating. (Nowadays balls only cost $7 or £5 or €6 so the kids can keep them.)
They kept being really stingy about balls until Ray Chapman was tragically killed by a dirt-darkened ball pitched to him during the low-visibility twilight hours of a late afternoon game. He is still the only player to ever die directly from injuries received during a major league baseball game.
Soon after Chapman’s death, baseball officials started instructing umpires to replace balls whenever they became dirty, but it still took them another 30 years before they had the very smart idea of perhaps wearing helmets? Perhaps wearing helmets when they’re throwing very fast balls really close to their bodies? Took them 30 years.
Before a baseball can be used, it has to be massaged with special mud for 30 seconds, or it’ll be very slick and hard and thus quite dangerous. Each MLB team is supplied with 10 pounds of mud at the start of the season, and it all comes from one guy with a shovel in New Jersey.
Major League Baseball generated over $12 billion in revenue in 2024 and its entire operation relies on a New Jersey mud man. They’re not exactly overjoyed by this and have attempted to develop special balls that work just fine without the mud, but they’ve been unsuccessful thus far. And you know what? Good. Long live the mud.
You can buy the mud here if you have an upcoming white elephant gift exchange, or perhaps if you’re still searching for the perfect graduation gift. This is an absolutely stellar gift for the recent grads in your life. Nothing says “your life is gonna be awesome” like a tub of mud from New Jersey.
And before we move on to basketball, how about this weather we’ve been having? It’s been affecting how many home runs are being hit, right? Yes, actually, that’s correct. That’s the next fact I’m gonna share.
Generally speaking, more home runs are hit during the summer months, when warmer, more humid, and less dense air allows baseballs to travel further than in cooler temperatures.
From The Washington Post:
For every 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degree Fahrenheit) increase in temperature, the number of home runs in a game increases by 1.96 percent, according to a study published in April [2023] that analyzed home run and weather data from more than 100,000 MLB games between 1962 and 2019.
The study also linked more than 500 home runs since 2010 to climate warming and predicted another 130 to 467 home runs per year by 2100, depending on how fast the Earth warms.
And I know what you’re thinking – is meteorological information being utilized by sports betters to predict when more home runs will occur? You probably weren’t thinking that. But yes, it is. The Washington Post again:
The free website displays the current “Home Run Forecast Index” at each major league ballpark. The index ranges from 1 to 10, with lower values indicating less favorable conditions for home runs and higher values indicating more favorable conditions. A premium subscription provides hour-by-hour forecasts of the index and weather for every game on the same day and next day.
BASKETBALL
It used to be rowdier!
The first basketball was actually a soccer ball because basketballs didn't exist yet because basketball itself had just been invented and didn’t even have a name yet. Take a deep breath, the previous sentence is finally over.
When James Naismith announced to his students, young men training to become YMCA instructors, that he had invented a new sport, one replied rather uncheerfully: “Harrumph. Another new game,” which, I gotta say, is actually exactly how I would have expected a college student in 1891 to express his frustration, so props to him.
Early basketballs were brown until the 1950s came along and somebody decided that an orange ball would be more visible than a brown ball to players and spectators both, and the orange basketball was thus born. Sometimes it really is that simple. Neon green hockey pucks when?
The first basketball that wasn’t actually a soccer ball was made by Spalding in 1894. Mr. Spalding, or Albert, as his friends called him, was a retired baseball player who had pitched more than 300 games with balls he made himself, so he kinda knew what he was doing in the ball-making department.
Albert Spalding was also a trendsetter in the area of “wearing a baseball glove while playing baseball,” because it used to just be dudes and their bare hands, which caused about as many injuries as you would expect. Catchers, in particular, used to get so many hand injuries that they had to alternate days with other catchers to allow their hands time to recover.
Before we end our basketball adventure with an always-mesmerizing “how it’s made” video, I want to share my new favorite basketball fact.
Take a second and think about why the backboard was invented. If you, like me, have genuinely never considered this before in your life, you might feel a bit puzzled.
The first-ever baskets were wooden peach baskets nailed to elevated walkways around the gymnasium. And because players were shooting at a target directly affixed to the elevated walkway, people watching from up there could easily interfere with the game by swatting at or catching the ball when it was shot. And you know what? Kinda funny. I kinda don’t hate that. If I had a time machine but could only take one trip, there’d be a strong case to be made for “rowdy YMCA basketball game in 1899 where loose-collared hooligans keep interfering with shots” over “prevent the JFK assassination.”
The first backboard (made from chicken wire) was only introduced to prevent fan interference, not due to any shooting considerations. Wire was succeeded by wood and later glass. Backboards became an official part of the basket design in 1906, along with metal hoops and nets.
Another important development was removing the bottoms from the baskets. Originally, they had been left in, which meant balls had to be manually removed from the basket after each score (which wasn’t as often as today – the final score of the first ever game was 1-0).
Oh, also, one more thing: James Naismith’s handwritten notes revealed that basketball took inspiration from a medieval children’s game called duck on a rock, which I can really only describe as a very rock-centric cousin of kick the can. And, you know, before today I never considered the similarities between basketball and kick the can, but now that the idea is in my head, I can totally see it. Basketball is 5D kick the can.
Anyway, here’s how it’s made:
SOCCER/FOOTBALL
It needs more balls than you’d think!
As a BBC columnist once put it, the soccer ball/football is “[t]he centre piece of the beautiful game, without which 22 blokes would look rather silly.” Counterpoint: I would wager they still look somewhat silly. But would you believe that they used to look even more silly?
Picture this: a bunch of people in “the olden times” kicking around inflated animal bladders and stomachs. That’s what soccer used to be. Maybe they should have called it stomach ball? Let’s see Nike put a logo on that.
Shockingly, evolutionary forces had not selected for animal bladders that could withstand repeated kicks by human feet, so these early soccer balls fell apart very easily.
Along came Charles Goodyear (of blimp fame) who said, “mind if I vulcanize some rubber for you chaps?” and soccer balls were forever transformed. The new balls were vastly improved and more standardized than before, but there was still not universal agreement on what exactly a soccer ball should look like. In fact, the very first FIFA World Cup final in 1930 featured a different ball in each half, as the teams could not agree on which one to use.
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But worry not, the balls are much better now! Modern soccer/foot/stomach balls are made from various synthetic materials, like polyurethane and polyvinyl chloride (i.e. PVC, i.e. the same stuff used in your credit card and the pipes beneath your sink).
Most of the world’s soccer balls (around 70%) are made in a single city in Pakistan, where 1,000 different factories employing 60,000 people are churning out 160,000 balls every month.
Over an entire year, that’s nearly two million balls, which really seemed to me like an excessive amount of balls until the Library of Congress told me that the global tally of soccer players is “over 240 million registered players worldwide with fan participation in the billions,” at which point two million yearly balls actually didn’t seem like enough anymore.
Part of the reason they need so many balls is the multiball system, which is likely familiar to anyone who’s ever seen a Ball Assistant (real job title) chasing the balls that go out of bounds at professional matches. As far as I can tell, the multiball system is used by some, but not all, professional leagues and tournaments.
According to the Premier League’s official multiball protocols, 15 balls must be present at each match, 13 of which are stored on cute little cones surrounding the pitch. One of the other balls is with the fourth official, and one is being kicked around or head-bonked around or maybe, if you’re Luis Suárez and not actively biting people, being batted around with your hands (didn’t think that was allowed but ok).
Pro tip: maybe don’t bite people? Didn’t your mother teach you to keep your teeth to yourself?
The multiball system was introduced to combat time-wasting, which is a much bigger problem than I’d realized. During the 2022 World Cup, for example, the ball was only in play for about 57% of the total match time. The rest was idle time when play was stopped before throw-ins and corner kicks, or after goals.
According to an analysis of the 2022-23 Premier League season, there was an average delay of 16 seconds for every throw-in, 33 seconds for every corner kick, and nearly two minutes for a penalty kick. The average time from a player scoring a goal to play being restarted at midfield was 72 seconds.
The Premier League’s multiball system in its current format was first introduced in the 2022-2023 season, although previous versions have existed in the past. Along with all their other magical powers and abilities, the referees are free to suspend the multiball system at any point for any reason, such as “the players keep attacking the Ball Assistants.”
You know how they say that safety rules are written in blood? Well in this case, time-wasting rules are written in “wealthy teenagers getting kicked in the ribs by Eden Hazard.”
Late in a 2013 Chelsea vs. Swansea match, a Swansea ballboy fell on top of a ball that had just rolled out of bounds, and he refused to get up. Frustrated by this obvious time-wasting measure, Eden Hazard gave the ballboy a quick jab in the ribs with the toe of his cleat, freeing the ball from his grasp.
Hazard was red-carded as the ballboy writhed in apparent pain. Hazard also received a three-match ban for his actions, which actually worked out pretty well for him:
“The funny story is … my wife was just pregnant and the baby was coming now – that day. So me? Getting the red card? Three games out? Perfect. You know? That's the reality. Perfect holiday, thank you guys!'
After the match, it came to light that the ballboy was not any ordinary ballboy but the 17-year-old son of Swansea’s director. His father also owned a luxury hotel in Swansea that likely hosted Chelsea players and staff while they were in town.
The ballboy quickly became a minor celebrity and gained 87,000 Twitter followers, one of whom must have noticed this tweet he posted just hours before the match:
And here’s the thing: the kid was obviously a rich brat but there’s also a small part of me that thinks what he did was actually very funny. There’s a part of me that wishes ballboys would start messing with the players every game. If they started allowing deliberate time-wasting but only for Ball Assistants, I think that would add a very compelling strategic element to the game. Now, teams wouldn’t just be searching for the best on-field talent, but also the best local children who are most willing to get kicked in the ribs and/or fight back against professional athletes. FIFA, feel free to DM - i got lots more ideas just like this.
If you’re wondering what the ballboy is up to nowadays, well, he took the most obvious career path I can imagine for a spoiled British hotel heir, which is that he created his own gold-filtered vodka brand.
His estimated net worth is nearly $80 million (£60 million, €70 million) and he’s thankfully maintaining the “kicked ballboy” thing as a core part of his identity”:
“For me, a big part of creating Au Vodka and trying to make a success of this brand was to not just be known as ‘that Swansea ball boy’, but for people to see that that ball boy went on to create something really special.”
Anyway, here’s the video of him getting kicked:
And more on ballboy controversy if you are interested.
That’s all there is to say about balls this week! Let me know in the comments if you’re jonesing for more balls content (football, golf, hockey (I know a puck isn’t a ball but I make the rules around here, okay?)) or if you’d rather see things go in a wildly different direction next week.
If you enjoyed this piece, consider throwing me a few bucks (I will spend it on snacks).
I knew none of this and now feel overqualified to attend a minor league game with coworkers. Thank you.
Fun column. Show more stuff being made. Some of that must be fascinating. Baseball bats, for instance.