He’s Baseball’s Solely Mud Provider. It’s a Job He Could Quickly Lose.

LONGPORT, N.J. — A forty five-gallon rubber barrel sits in a cluttered storage alongside the Jersey Shore, stuffed waist-high with what seems just like the world’s least appetizing chocolate pudding. It’s nothing greater than icky, gooey, viscous, gelatinous mud.

Ah, however what mud. The mud that desires are manufactured from.

This explicit mud, hauled in buckets by one man from a secret spot alongside a New Jersey riverbank, is singular in its capacity to chop the slippery sheen of a brand new baseball and supply a agency grip for the pitcher hurling it at life-threatening pace towards one other human standing simply 60 ft and 6 inches away.

Tubs of the substance are discovered at each main league ballpark. It’s rubbed into each one of many 144 to 180 balls utilized in each one of many 2,430 main league video games performed in a season, in addition to these performed within the postseason. The mudding of a “pearl” — a pristine ball proper out of the field — has been baseball customized for many of the final century, ever since a journeyman named Lena Blackburne introduced the mud as an alternative choice to tobacco spit and infield filth, which tended to show the ball into an overripe plum.

Contemplate what this implies: That Main League Baseball — a multi-billion-dollar enterprise making use of science and analytics to almost each side of the sport — finally will depend on some geographically particular muck collected by a retiree with a grey ponytail, blurry arm tattoos and a flat-edged shovel.

“Throughout the final six weeks, I’ve shipped to the Diamondbacks, the Rangers and the Blue Jays,” the mud man, Jim Bintliff, mentioned just lately, as he lingered protectively beside his garaged barrel of goop.

However M.L.B. executives don’t precisely get all misty-eyed over the whimsical custom of what’s known as Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, which they are saying is just too typically inconsistently utilized. Of their quest to make balls extra constant — and the sport extra equitable — they’ve tried to give you a substitute, even assigning chemists and engineers to develop a ball with the specified really feel.

The rating thus far:

Lena Blackburne: 1

Main League Baseball: 0

Glen Caplin, an M.L.B. spokesman, mentioned that “pre-tack baseballs” are persevering with to be examined within the minor leagues. However the evaluations have been combined.

“In case you change one property of a baseball, you sacrifice one thing,” Caplin mentioned. “The hold forth the bat was completely different. The ball felt softer. The bar to vary a ball may be very excessive.”

Nonetheless, he mentioned, “It’s an ongoing challenge.”

Bintliff is aware of the sport isn’t over. He mentioned that baseball’s obvious efforts to displace him and his mud used to disrupt his sleep. Now, he mentioned, he’s change into extra philosophical.

“In the event that they stopped ordering, I’d be extra upset by the tip of the custom, not my backside line,” he mentioned, standing in his storage in pink shorts and white high-top Chuck Taylor sneakers. “In the event that they don’t need the mud, they don’t have to purchase it.”

The custom started with Russell Blackburne, a.ok.a. Lena, a feisty, weak-hitting infielder who banged across the main leagues within the 1910s earlier than settling in as a major-league coach and supervisor. A lifer, seen in black-and-white images beside the likes of Ty Cobb and Connie Mack.

Whereas teaching third base for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1938, he heard an umpire complain in regards to the wrestle to organize brand-new balls to be used. Blackburne experimented with mud from a Delaware River tributary, not removed from his New Jersey residence, and located that it de-glossed the ball whereas largely sustaining its whiteness.

He now had a facet job. After some time, each main and minor league group was utilizing what typically got here to be known as “Mississippi mud” — although “mysterious” would have been extra apt than Mississippi.

Earlier than Blackburne died at 81 in 1968, he bequeathed the key spot to an previous pal who had joined him in mud harvesting: Bintliff’s grandfather, who left it to Bintliff’s mom and father, who, in 2000, handed it on to Bintliff.

Bintliff, 65, served within the Navy and labored for many years as a printing-press operator, however the mystical mud remained a continuing in his life. Even now, he sees himself as he was in 1965, a rail-thin boy loading pails of freshly collected mud into the again of his grandfather’s Chevy Impala.

Over time, Bintliff and his spouse, Joanne, who handles the executive work, have tinkered with the enterprise mannequin. For instance, he used to reap mud a few times a yr. However increasing their market to scholastic {and professional} soccer groups — together with various within the Nationwide Soccer League — has required month-to-month returns to the riverbank.

The elemental work, although, stays the identical, with timing depending on the tide.

Bintliff will drive his Chevy Silverado pickup 70 miles or so to the key spot and stroll 50 yards by way of woods. Alongside along with his shovel and buckets, he can have a machete for any overgrowth and some fibs for any inquisitors. The mud does miracles for his backyard, he would possibly say.

Then again to his Jersey Shore residence. The drive takes longer than the harvest.

For the subsequent 4 weeks, Bintliff will pressure the mud into the rubber barrel, skim the river water rising to the highest, use loads of faucet water to eradicate odor, apply a “proprietary therapy” he declines to explain — and let the stuff settle.

“It ages like a advantageous wine,” he mentioned.

When the mud has achieved its optimum classic, he fills the excellent orders — $100 for the two.5-pound skilled dimension, $65 for the 1.5-pound institutional dimension, and $25 for the 8-ounce “private” dimension — and heads to the publish workplace to ship some extra mud-packed plastic containers.

Bintliff mentioned his revenue is modest. For instance, he mentioned, Main League Baseball pays lower than $20,000 a yr to have 10 kilos of the Lena Blackburne mud despatched to every of the 30 main league groups. If a group wants extra throughout a season, it offers straight with him.

He mentioned he’s motivated much less by the cash than by the marvel of all of it. Think about: This mud, containing a really explicit mineral composition, is used to bless each main league baseball. And if the marvel escapes Main League Baseball, then, Bintliff mentioned, “So be it.”

The query of the place Lena Blackburne’s mud matches in as we speak’s recreation comes as M.L.B. Commissioner Rob Manfred heads up the drive for consistency. However in a sport of numerous variables, this pursuit can typically appear quixotic.

To start with, baseballs are like snowflakes; although every one is handmade and held along with 108 pink stitches, no two are similar. What’s extra, they behave in a different way relying on the native setting — a problem that M.L.B. has tried to handle by requiring each ballpark to retailer baseballs in a humidor set at 70 levels Fahrenheit and 57 p.c relative humidity (The humidor for the Colorado Rockies ballpark is ready at 65 p.c relative humidity to regulate for the excessive altitude.).

The humidors are one reflection of the true preciousness of a mere baseball. Lower than three inches in diameter and weighing about 5 ounces, it’s the solar round which the sport revolves — albeit a solar that soars, bounces, curves and eludes.

To make sure a replenishing provide of baseballs, M.L.B. has change into part-owner of the Rawlings Sporting Items Firm, which manufactures main league balls in a manufacturing unit in Costa Rica. The transfer additionally presumably offers M.L.B. some say-so within the completed product.

And to guard the baseball’s honor, M.L.B. has taken a number of steps, together with cracking down on the doctoring of balls with Gorilla Glue-like substances that enable a pitcher to extend the spin charge and obtain virtually Wiffle ball motion.

Nonetheless, there stays the messy matter of mud.

Based on Caplin, the M.L.B. spokesman, the sport’s entrance workplace started receiving complaints that some recreation balls had been each missing the specified grip and “chalky to the contact,” maybe from lingering too lengthy on the backside of ball luggage. M.L.B. started an investigation that included asking every of the 30 groups to ship movies of their clubhouse staff “mudding” the balls for game-day use.

“What you discovered was 30 alternative ways of the best way to apply the mud,” Caplin mentioned. “Some guys simply used a towel, whereas different guys actually rubbed it in, getting it ingrained into the leather-based.”

M.L.B. executives responded by sending a memorandum final month to each group with up to date laws for the “Storage and Dealing with of Baseballs.” The directions for the best way to mud a baseball are Talmudic.

“All baseballs projected for use in a selected recreation should be mudded inside 3 hours of all different baseballs being utilized in that recreation, and should be mudded on the identical day that they’re going to be used … Baseballs shouldn’t be out of the humidor for greater than two hours at any level previous to first pitch … Rubbing mud ought to be utilized to every baseball for not less than 30 seconds guaranteeing that mud is rubbed completely and constantly into the complete leather-based floor of the ball … ”

The memorandum directed group staff to seek the advice of the “Mudding Utility Requirements” poster, on show in each clubhouse, to make sure that the colour of a mudded ball is neither too darkish nor too gentle, however good.

Three large league groups — the Yankees, the Philadelphia Phillies and the Washington Nationals — declined to permit a reporter to look at a clubhouse worker interact within the seemingly innocuous however apparently delicate job of rubbing mud right into a baseball. Luckily, M.L.B. additionally despatched all groups a 50-second educational video demonstrating the virtually worshipful care anticipated in correctly mudding a pearl.

A splash of water is poured into the jar of Lena Blackburne mud. The fingers of an unknown clubbie dips three fingertips calmly into the mud, then selects a virgin ball from a field of a dozen. For the subsequent 36 seconds, the fingers rub, roll and therapeutic massage, working the mud into the grain and alongside the seams earlier than plopping the now off-white ball again within the field.

The straightforward act is surprisingly solemn, as if the integrity of the nationwide pastime relied on communion between a ball made in Costa Rica and dirt shoveled from a Jersey river.

However Jim Bintliff, the harvester of mud, is aware of higher than most that the tides are perpetually altering. All he can do for now’s to proceed honoring a ritual begun by a largely forgotten infielder from the dead-ball period who lives on with each thrown pitch.

The opposite day, Bintliff threw his flat-edged shovel into his pickup and headed once more to the key place. He got here again with 20 pails of lovely, mucky custom.

Audio produced by Parin Behrooz.