What do they use? Mud. Yes, mud.

But not just any mud. For more than 60 years, all the mud used in major league baseball has been harvested from the same secret spot in southern New Jersey.

Jim Bintliff, the third-generation owner of Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, gets it from the banks of a tributary of the Delaware River.
Legend has it rubbing down new baseballs started after a wild pitch killed a batter in the 1920s. Bintliff said players and umpires tried tobacco juice and infield dirt to remove the factory sheen. What ended up working best was mud drawn from near the favorite fishing spot of a friend of Bintliff’s grandfather.
What makes his mud so special?

"It's the texture," said Bintliff, who described it as a mixture of cold cream and chocolate pudding. "If it's too gritty, it can damage the leather on the ball. It can scratch it."

Bintliff runs the mud through a series of screens before packaging it, aging it (like fine wine, he says), and shipping it.

Baseball is a sport of tradition and superstition, and many chalk up the sport’s fidelity to this particular mud to just that.

“To do it is a good idea,” said Robert Adair, a former Yale professor who wrote The Physics of Baseball. “To use this particular mud and everything is (one of the) charming traditions that connect us to our grandparents.”

But Adair acknowledges that there is some science behind Bintliff’s main selling point – his product’s smooth texture.

"Let's say you scuff or scar the ball on one side, that can produce asymmetric forces on the ball," Adair said.

If the ball is really scratched up, the air going over the marred side would have a different pattern than air going over the smooth side and the ball would curve toward the roughed-up side, Adair said. "If you threw the ball just any old way, you wouldn't get much of an effect, because the scarred spot would rotate,” he said.

If a sneaky pitcher is good, though, he throws the ball so the scarring is always on the same side. Adair estimated serious scratches could make the ball veer six inches one way or the other.

The mud’s origin in a tidal tributary rather than the larger Delaware River, then, is key.

"(In) the main-stem Delaware, a lot of the bottom sediment is coarser grain material," said David Velinksy, a marine biogeochemist with the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Fine-grain sediments stay suspended in the rushing water of major rivers. In slower-moving tributaries, they have a chance to settle out, Velinksy said.

Of course, Jim Bintliff adds a secret ingredient to the mud after harvesting, so it’s not just Mother Nature who is responsible for the magic mud.

To see additional video from QUEST Philadelphia for this story, see: Baseball's dirty little secret.

Gulls making fast work of AT&T Park leftovers. Credit: Flickr, Malingering.

In a QUEST radio story on Monday, I cover the Bay Area's California gull population becoming a major concern for the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project. Thousands of acres of industrial salt ponds are being restored for shorebirds and other wildlife. And that restoration work is creating a big opportunity for some very aggressive gulls.

While reporting the story, I stumbled upon a mystery that's well-known to San Francisco Giants fans: Some gulls have an uncanny way of showing up at AT&T Park during the eighth or ninth inning of a ballgame.

Day game or night game, the gulls bizarrely seem to know when the game is close to ending, pouncing on leftover hot dogs and garlic fries. As Giants broadcaster Mike Krukow said, "if you were a gull, where would you be?"

There are a lot of popular theories about how the gulls time their arrival so well. Do they recognize the illustrious beard of Giants closer Brian Wilson? Do they know “Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” a tune that's always sung during the seventh inning stretch?

I spoke to a few local experts to get their take…

Dan Murphy, Volunteer with Golden Gate Audubon:

It's a crime of opportunity. They're very well attuned to our behavior and our trash. When there are large numbers of people in the stands, gulls don't come into the ballpark. But they can sense when things are starting to wind down. A lot of people leave the game before it's over, so they might be clued in by people moving out of the upper deck toward the eighth inning. That makes sense since they seem to settle on the left field side first.

If a game goes into extra innings, the gulls still seem to know when the ninth inning is. You'll see them sitting on the roof or on the big glove in the outfield, waiting for the game to end. That may still be due to the fans that leave early, but they seem to have a sense of how long games normally go. It's likely that a few birds are always watching and as soon as a few birds go in, others will follow. They're really good at what they do. They find food sources and use them to the max.

David Shuford, Biologist with PRBO Conservation Science:

Gulls spend their day cruising around a lot. But once they figure something out, they tend to come back. So even though the ninth inning doesn't happen at the same time each day, once a few gulls pick up on it, you'll soon have a crowd. It's possible that they can recognize the sounds, too, like songs that are played during the game. Gulls are pretty good about sound.

In general, they're really good at figuring things out. Like when local dumps are closed on the weekends, the gulls seem to know that and don't show up on those days. It's hard to know if they truly know what Saturday is. They may just be cruising by and not see any action, so they don't land. But they seem to recognize the pattern.

Gulls have an advantage – they're total generalists. They're smart and they're tough. They can eat just about anything too. They go after fish, garbage, and other birds. Some of our work on the Farallon Islands has shown that gulls can actually recognize certain individual people as well.

Josh Ackerman, Research Wildlife Biologist with USGS:

They do exactly that same thing at the landfills in the Bay Area. We've done studies on gulls where we've tagged them with transmitters and tracked them daily for two years. California gulls depend on a few of the landfills in the South Bay for food. They arrive exactly when the dumps open and leave right when they close, since the trash piles are covered up when the landfill isn't operating. From our studies, we know that the gulls cover a lot of territory during the day, so it's not a big deal for them to travel to find food.

George Costa, Senior Vice President of Ballpark Operations at AT&T Park:

We've seen an uptick. There seem to be more gulls lately. They always time their arrival to an inning or two innings before the game ends. They're creatures of habit. They know where the food is and that crowds mean food. They're never here except for game days, but if there's a game, they crash the party every night.

It's a series of triggers that tells them it's time. They see the lights and the crowds. There are food smells, like the garlic fries. It's a combination of all those things. You'll see the gulls line up on the left field roof before the game ends. We see the scouts come in and they cue the rest of the gulls.

It's a nuisance really and the fans don't enjoy it. So we're looking at a variety of possibilities to deal with it, including having a falcon on site. They've used them at other ballparks and they seem to work there. You won't get rid of the gulls completely, but we think it would get rid of about 80 percent. We have to retrain these gulls.

Hangar One at Moffet field is "cavernous."

I think most people who have been stuck in traffic, grinding away on their daily commute up Highway 101 in Mountain View, have casually glanced towards Moffett Field and wondered, "What the heck are those things?" Like me, maybe they remember hearing vague explanations about blimps. Hanger One at Moffett Field is surely a curious feature on the lower Peninsula, a landmark in the distance and a place most Bay Area residents know of but have never had the chance to see up close. The first time I walked into Hanger One I was stunned. You don’t get an idea of the scale of these buildings until you step inside. You start rattling off words like "massive" and “cavernous" and "enormous." I have a buddy who played baseball inside Hanger One when he was stationed at Moffett for the Navy. He told me nobody ever hit a ball close to reaching the ceiling.

Moffett Field and Hanger One are historic treasures. Now a group is attempting to save the old buildings. If you are curious about the history of this place and want to learn about preservation efforts, I urge you to check out the Moffett Field Historical Society. The gallery alone is worth the effort!

Watch the Zeppelins Resurrected television story online.

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Dave Barker of the Exploratorium
gets some batting tips

The idea behind "corking" a bat is that the bat will be lighter and the batter will be able to swing it faster, hopefully imparting more power to the ball. If you watch QUEST's TV feature on the physics of baseball, you'll see my Exploratorium colleague David Barker learning from the CalBears batting coach that getting the bat going fast is a key to whacking the ball as far as possible. In fact, today's players use bats that are lighter and shorter than the ones swung decades ago, for just this reason.

Unfortunately for Sammy Sosa (and others before him who pulled the same stunt), corking the bat to make it lighter is a flawed approach. A wooden bat is a close-to-perfect swatting tool: it's solid enough to resist absorbing much impact from the ball, but not so hard that it overly deforms the ball when hitting it. A bat with cork in the middle will be squishier, and won't hit the ball as hard. Imagine the difference you'd expect if the bat were made of pillows. That's a little extreme, but you get the idea. According to a recent Mythbusters show, corked bats don't improve the power of a hit.

See for yourself what a difference swing speed can make. Check out our online "Scientific Slugger." You can choose different swing speeds and pitches, and see which combinations go farthest (if hit perfectly).

Did Sammy know he was swinging a corked bat the day he was caught, or was it truly an accident? We'll probably never know. But what's clearer is that, in terms of a baseball career, it probably wasn’t worth the risk.

Robin Marks is a journalist and science writer who current serves as a Multimedia Projects Developer for the Exploratorium in San Francisco, CA.