You hit, I mint!

The most lucrative business today must be the manufacture of baseballs. Watch the game for a while, and try to count the number of balls they use up before play ends. I have not tried this yet, but am convinced that the number will be quite staggering.

Let me attempt to list the more obvious sources of wastage. First, any ball that is hit once by the bat, has to be thrown away! There is no doubt about this. Pitcher hurls the ball, batter hits the ball cleanly, fielder pouches it in his bucket (that stupid glove they use. Come on now, be a man, and catch it bare-handed like in cricket!) Even if the ball never bounces into the dirt, the fielder chucks it into the crowd.

Let us now say that the pitcher loses his radar for a bit, and the ball bounces once before being held by the catcher (the guy who squats behind the batter). Does the ball get reused? It is not entirely clear, but it definitely does not enter the game immediately. Instead, the catcher passes it along to the umpire (who half-squats behind him). The umpire gives him a brand new ball to play with, while he either surreptitiously discards the old one, or inspects it with a microscope (also surreptitiously, since I have never seen him do this on television) to determine if it has not been spoiled in some way. Essentially, the bump ball is soiled until proven otherwise.

Only when the pitcher delivers the ball directly into the glove of the catcher, without being intercepted by anything solid on the way, does the ball come back into play immediately.

So, at a minimum, with 9 innings, 3 batters per inning and 3 pitches per batter (two fouls and a ball in play that gets an out), we are talking about 81 pitches. In reality, there are way more than 3 pitches per batter, so we must scale this number by at least 2. That yields 162 pitches. Now factor the other team in, and we double this estimate to 324.

A solitary Google hit, a web page from 2001, explains that a Major League game averages 250-300 pitches, and that the average life of a baseball is 6 pitches. That is 50-60 balls per game (according to my pitch calculation), without counting the possibility of endless extra innings (don't ask me... it is all too complicated. Maybe in another post). [Aside: extra-inning games are not that uncommon. They happen with sickening regularity, and they continue until a score difference is achieved.]

There are, of course, many assumptions in the above calculations. However, it does seem to be in the ballpark (hehe!).

On top of all the game balls, we need more of them for Spring training, game-day practice, warm-ups and for plain, old autographing. And all this for one game. Each team plays some 160 games a year, and some progress further and play a few more. There are 30 teams currently in the Major League fray. Of course, there are the lesser mortals too, who play in the Minor Leagues, in schools, playgrounds, ...

These are very, very good numbers indeed for the makers of baseballs!