Baseball mud
Started with the Athletics
When I was a younger man, I spent a couple of years traveling the country on business. I always carried some baseball bats in my trunk. Once my workday was done, instead of heading to the local watering hole, I’d find the batting cages and hit balls until my hands blistered. As I got older, I just loved hitting baseballs. Hitting a baseball shot out of an automated pitching machine is hard enough. Hitting one throw by a living human being who knows what he is doing, is darned near impossible. That’s one of the things that makes baseball a fascinating, and beautiful, sport.
Recently I got to thinking why they rub mud on baseballs before putting them in use. It sounds counterintuitive, right? Your first thought is the mud would darken up the ball, which is hard enough to hit when you can see it plainly. Don’t the pitchers have enough advantages already, un jeune homme?
When we were kids, we’d hang around the ballpark while the American Legion played, hoping to snag a foul ball. The team usually positioned someone behind the stands, who would pay 10 cents to anyone who returned a foul ball. When we were desperate for a ball, we said screw the dime and keep the ball. We’d then play with that ball until the cover literally fell off. Then it was back to the ballpark to snag another. We didn’t need to rub those balls with mud, they got plenty dirty of their own accord.
Major League Baseball has a rule for this, 4.01(c), which states that all baseballs “shall be properly rubbed so that the gloss is removed”. You gotta love America. We can put a man on the moon, manipulate money a hundred different ways, build skyscrapers, fly airplanes and all sorts of other wonderous things, but we can’t make a baseball that has a dull finish.
Turns out that when balls come out of the factory, they’re too bright and slick. Umpires used to rub new balls in the dirt around home plate, sometimes adding in a couple of spits of tobacco juice. That changed when a third base coach of the Philadelphia Athletics named Lena Blackburne heard an umpire complaining about this method. Being an industrious sort, Blackburne set out to find a better way. And he did. He found the holy grail of mud pits somewhere outside of his home near Palmyra, New Jersey, and The Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud Company was born. The American League was an early adopter of the mud and by the early 1950s, every team in major league baseball and most minor league teams were using Blackburne’s magical mud.
Blackburne’s life had two parts, the first was Lena Blackburne the ballplayer. Blackburne, whose real first name is Russell, was born October 23, 1886, in Clifton Heights, New Jersey. In his youth, Blackburne played football and baseball in the Palmyra, New Jersey area, where he was discovered and signed by Providence of the Eastern League. In 1909, Providence traded him to the Chicago White Sox for cash and two players. Blackburne, who also went by the wonderful nickname Slats, was primarily a middle infielder, logging time at shortstop, second and third base with three games at first and as a pitcher. He made his major league debut with the White Sox on April 14, 1910, and over the next 20 seasons, played for four different teams. He was never much of a hitter, with a lifetime slash of .214/.284/.268 but still managed to accrue 2.9 WAR over 550 major league games, thanks to his nifty glove work.
In 1933, he started coaching third base for the Philadelphia Athletics and his former manager Connie Mack. Blackburne stayed with the Athletics as a scout after the club moved to Kansas City. He did get one look as a manager, guiding the White Sox for a 232-game stretch between 1928 and 1929.
It was during his time coaching third base for the Athletics when inspiration struck Blackburne and he decided to solve the baseball mud problem. Blackburne thought back to his youth and a pool of mud he discovered near where Pennsauken Creek runs into the Delaware River. The rise and fall of the tide purified the mud into a perfect mixture, inky black and smooth as a bowl of pudding. Being a hard-core American Leaguer, Blackburne resisted selling his mud to the National League until the mid-1950s.
Blackburne’s Mud was soon a full-time business. Each fall, Lena would cart several large buckets of the gunk back to his garage, where he would filter it, then add his special ingredient, which like the Kentucky Fried Chicken or Coca-Cola recipe, remains a secret. Bill Kinnamon, an American League umpire in the 1960s said, “There’s something about this mud. I don’t know how to explain it. It takes the shine off without getting the ball excessively dark.”
Blackburne passed away February 28, 1968, at the age of 81 and upon his death, the Mud company passed to his close friend John Haas. When Haas passed away, control of the company went to his son-in-law Burns Bintliff, who later passed control to one of his sons, Jim Bintliff, who runs the company today. Jim Bintliff procures about 1,000 pounds of the mud each fall for processing and sale.
In 1982, the New York Times commissioned a scientific analysis of the mud by Dr. Kenneth Deffeyes, a professor of Geology at Princeton University. Deffeyes said the mud was about 90% finely ground quartz, probably crushed by the ice that covered New Jersey during the Pleistocene Epoch more than 10,000 years ago.
Bintliff says he doesn’t make much money from the mud business, just enough to fund a nice vacation for him and his wife, which they often take to Cooperstown, to visit the Hall of Fame. How can you not love baseball and the people around the game?
The Lena Blackburne Mud Company does have an excellent website, where you can order your own can of mud, along with T-shirts, polo shirts and golf towels. So, ladies and gentlemen, if you’re looking for a gift for your hard to find baseball fan, consider something from the Blackburne Mud Company.