The Weight of Baseball

If you are a frequent reader of my columns, you know that Baseball is my game. I cannot get enough of it. So….

I was thinking about the weight of things recently for no apparent reason whatsoever. Random things. Strange things. Everyday things.

Baseball things.

Anyway, I was sitting on my couch with a baseball in my hand. I started thinking about how it felt in my hand and what my estimate of its weight is. I figured somewhere around four and a half ounces should be about right. So I went into the kitchen and put it on the food scale. Five ounces exactly. I was close.

Photo NBC Sports

I Googled it. MLB Baseballs vary from five to five and one-quarter ounces. Then I started thinking about how much five ounces of cork (rubber these days), twine, and cowhide can mean to a person, and suddenly, the weight of a baseball becomes much heavier.

Think about the look on a child’s face when they get a ball at a baseball game. And it is not just children who get that look. Adults of any age are excited as well when they get a foul ball or chase down a home run ball. It is exhilarating to say the least.

That is why fans clamor for those balls in the stands like crazy. They all want the feeling a child has, even if only for a brief second or two. Sadly, though, many of us have seen videos of terrible people who snatch balls away from other fans, even kids.

Thankfully, most of us don’t tolerate this behavior. Think about the “fan” in the Phillies jersey, who drew the ire of fans at a game when she berated a dad who had fairly retrieved a home-run ball and had given it to his son. Well, the response was such that she had to remove herself from social media, change her phone number, and even faced job termination (supposedly, she did not get fired).

On the flip side, there are many examples of the opposite–good people giving their newly acquired baseball to a child in the stands. In one example, Seattle’s catcher, Cal Raleigh, hit his sixtieth home run into the right field stands, where it was retrieved by a fan, Glenn Mutti-Driscoll. Not JUST a fan, he is a Gentleman in every sense of the word. A mensch. Here’s why.

Glenn got the home run ball and put it into the hands of a twelve-year-old boy. A complete stranger and a young Mariners fan. That boy, a young gentleman himself, then returned the ball to Cal Raleigh. Some people estimate that the ball could have fetched big money on the open market. But, sportsmanship won out, and the ball sits where it should, in Cal Raleigh’s possession.

There are myriad videos out there that put the proverbial lump in my throat. A young fan, ten or eleven years old, catches a foul ball in the stands. The young boy, full of pride, spins the baseball in his small hands for a moment. Then he notices a young girl, five or six years old, in the seats a few rows back. There is something about the love of the game that tugs at him, and he gets up, walks a few rows up the steps, and hands that young lady the ball. The look of surprise and wonder and, sometimes even, tears of joy on that girl’s face after receiving that gift gets me right in the feels.

The admiration I have for that young fan cannot be quantified. He has as pure a love for the game as one can have. He hasn’t been poisoned by commentary and news reports about the “sorry state of the (insert team name here) this season.” He only knows that he loves to watch these “supermen” in real life perform feats on the field that he hopes to someday replicate in his bedroom daydreaming, or in his backyard, or in the schoolyard with his buddies.

Wonderful dreams. God bless his innocence. God bless pure love for baseball.

Now, that old Rawlings baseball you are holding seems a lot heavier, doesn’t it?