WOW 8,000 to 10,000 Baseballs per Day

Dialj

http://www.reliableplant.com/view/25724/how-baseballs-are-manfuactured

I would have never thought it was this complicated.

YogiBerraFan

Cool video

Link

CNote

Wow, I can't believe they still stitch 'em by hand.

Dialj

According the one MLB source, based on the 162 game schedule x 15 teams (30 teams playing each other) = 2430 games. By MLB rules, the home team must provide 90 balls per game; of which between 60-70 are used. That means based on the 90 required per game there has to be 218,700 balls for the season. (21 days if one factory produces 10,000 balls a day and 27 days if it produces 8,000 balls a day) AMAZING!! I think my math is right.

Dboneesq

That was a GREAT 5 minutes! Pretty kewl to watch how the ball is made. Those people that stitch are AMAZING!

robbiegiggs

wow, cool video. Thanks for sharing.

BenG76

That was a cool video. I would have never thought that much of the process was done by hand. Theres a lot more involved in making a baseball than I would have thought.

relaxed

Thanks for sharing the video, very informative.

mlbfan2

<< <i>According the one MLB source, based on the 162 game schedule x 15 teams (30 teams playing each other) = 2430 games. By MLB rules, the home team must provide 90 balls per game; of which between 60-70 are used. That means based on the 90 required per game there has to be 218,700 balls for the season. (21 days if one factory produces 10,000 balls a day and 27 days if it produces 8,000 balls a day) AMAZING!! I think my math is right. >>



That's probably a very old source. The numbers are quite a bit higher than that these days.

This is from 2005.
MLB: The true life story of baseballs
Number of balls used per game in competition: 120-132
Number of balls used per game in batting practice: 168-180
Number of balls used per game, total: 288-312
Number of balls used per team per season: 30,600 — 9,000 for spring training, 21,600 for regular season)
Number of balls used in Major Leagues by all 30 teams per season: 918,000

Here was the breakdown for one game (104 baseball were used):
Foul balls, 32
foul tips, 24
balls exchanged by the home plate umpire, 19
balls tossed into the stands by players, 13
balls carried off by fielders as their half inning ended, 8
balls exchanged at the pitcher's request, 4
home runs, 1
wild pitches, 1
flukes, 2, once when an errant pitch hit Cota and once when Brewers catcher Chad Moeller plinked Daryle Ward's bat trying to throw the ball back to the pitcher.

"In the May 13 contest, on a velvety cool Friday evening at PNC Park, the Pirates and Brewers used 104 balls, which is about 15 fewer than in a typical home game, according to Pirates equipment manager Roger Wilson."

frankhardy

My wife and I both loved that video. Very neat!

lifeshouldbefun

In today's tech world, seems kind of primitive, but still cool

Tabe

That was awesome. The hand stitching was amazing.

Tabe

Tabe

<< <i>A lot of labor and hand work still! ... wow that sewing is insane ... very impressive. >>


I'll try not to get political here but want to address this point:

The reason the stuff is done by hand is because it's cheaper to hire a couple hundred workers to do the stuff than to design and build the very expensive machinery required to do the work. That stitching is very, very precise - a sewing machine that could work in high volumes on a spherical object like that would be very, very expensive. Ditto for all the other parts of the process. It's easier to just throw lots of workers at it than to try and automate.

Tabe

prthd

Americas pastime, made in China.

Very cool video

K

<< <i>Americas pastime, made in China. >>



Actually Costa Rica, but who's asking anyway.