For more than 80 years, baseball has relied on a stash of special mud to take the shine off balls’ slick leather and give fielders a better grip. The substance is rubbed on every baseball before ...

For nearly 100 years every ball used in MLB has been rubbed down with a very particular variety of mud before use. The league is experimenting with alternatives but nothing has stuck yet.

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 ...

The “magic mud” has become quite famous thanks to its longtime use in Major League Baseball (MLB). In fact, it’s been applied to the baseballs for every game for more than 80 years.

In 2019, at the behest of sportswriter Matthew Gutierrez, the group analyzed the composition and flow behavior of the mud, which has been harvested for generations by the Bintliff family at a secret ...

Each Major League Baseball (MLB) team’s equipment manager applies it to every game ball. ... He wanted to see if the mud actually makes balls perform better, as players claim.

And as Major League Baseball clamps down this month on pitchers using foreign substances to doctor balls, this mysterious mud remains the only agent approved by the league to be applied to baseballs.

For years, a special mud has been rubbed on every baseball before every major league game to make it less slippery. The mud’s story dates to the 1930s, and MLB still relies on one small supplier.

The unique properties of baseball’s famed “magic” mud have never been scientifically quantified — until now. In a new paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), researchers at ...