Useless Facts about Baseballs

• Each MLB baseball takes 10 minutes to hand-stitch.

• Every ball has exactly 108 double stitches — always red for visibility.

• About wool from 250 sheep is used to make just one season’s worth of MLB baseballs.

• Humidors: To keep balls consistent, MLB now requires many stadiums to store balls in humidity-controlled rooms (helps prevent “juiced balls”).

• The inside cork-and-rubber “pill” is wrapped in over 370 yards of wool yarn.

• In a single MLB game, 70–120 baseballs are used.

• A ball is removed if it gets scuffed, dirty, or even just touched by dirt.

• Average lifespan of an MLB baseball in play: just 7 pitches.

• MLB uses roughly 900,000 baseballs per season.

• Cost: A single MLB ball costs about $7–$10 to produce, but once authenticated as a game-used ball, it can sell for hundreds or thousands depending on the play.

• Foul ball souvenirs: Fans keep foul balls as souvenirs by tradition — a practice that started in the early 1900s.

• Fastest pitch ever recorded: 105.8 mph by Aroldis Chapman.

• A baseball leaves the bat at over 110 mph on hard contact — faster than a speeding car.

• A baseball can reach 400+ feet in the air when hit for a home run.

• The first baseballs were made of rocks, wrapped in string and leather.

• The word “base-ball” first appeared in print in 1744 (before the USA was a country).

• The longest MLB game ever lasted 8 hours, 25 minutes (25 innings).

• Babe Ruth once used a foul ball off the stands to warm up before hitting a home run.

• Baseballs are the only balls designed to “curve” in mid-air on purpose.

• If you stacked all the baseballs used in a season, they’d be taller than 200 Empire State Buildings.

• First baseballs: Early balls (1800s) were handmade by players or local craftsmen, often uneven and using rubber from old shoes.

• Horsehide to cowhide: Until 1974, MLB balls were covered with horsehide; now they’re all cowhide.

• The “mud rub”: Before every game, balls are rubbed with a special mud from a secret location on the Delaware River to reduce shine and improve grip.

• Traveling far: The farthest a baseball has ever been hit in MLB is estimated around 575 feet (Mickey Mantle, unofficial).