Introductions
Hi, What's your name? Where are you from? I'm glad to meet you. Well, today is the big day. Are you excited? I bet you are. I know I sure am. I can't wait for the game to start. I guess I should introduce myself. I am the Rawlings Official Major League Baseball or ROMLB short, and I am the narrator of story. My friends call me Bennie.
Where am I from, you ask? I'll be happy to tell you. In the big inning. Oh, wait! I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm really excited about the game, you see. I meant to say, in the beginning. The beginning of me, that is to say. I'm only one of the 2.2 million Major League baseballs produced each year.
I am the All-American kid...I mean ball... for the All-American game. Well not exactly. We (my friends and I) are actually made in Costa Rica. However, the parts all come from America. My center is a small rubber ball with a cork center (my heart) which comes from Mississippi. Yarn, twine and string from Vermont. I start out as a small rubber ball. Then approximately one mile of string is spun very tightly around the rubber ball. This is done by machine to keep the string consistently tight.
Next, my shiny white cover is sewn around the string. My cover is made of leather from Texas, Oklahoma, and Colorado. The leather is tanned in Tennessee. My cover is sewn around me with 108 red stitches. This procedure can be done only by hand. It can't be done by machine. The human race can put a man on the moon, but cannot make a machine that can properly stitch a baseball. Go figure.
It takes approximately 20 minutes to make each baseball. It takes 10 minutes to wind the string and be stamped with the MLB logo. Then the stitching process takes about ten minutes. After that, it takes a few hours for the logo to dry depending on the weather. Costa Rica is in Central America, South of Mexico, where the weather is usually hot and humid at the Rawlings factory. So, let's do some simple math. If we multiply 2,200,000 balls by twenty minutes for each ball, we get 44,000,000. Divide by 60 to get hours and that equals 733,333 hours and 20 minutes. My brain is hurting from all this math. Can we please change the subject.
Now I'm ready to go! Well, not quite. Due to the drying time for some glues used to secure the string to my center, I must spend another week in Costa Rica. Then I'm put in a box that holds a dozen balls. That's twelve balls if you weren't able to figure out the last problem. Four balls wide by three balls deep (4x3), or is it three balls wide by four balls deep (3x4)? My brain is starting to hurt again. Wait! I don't have a brain, just a heart. Remember?
Now my box, along with lots of others will go the warehouse awaiting our trip to the Major League Baseball stadiums in the United States and Canada.
