Mudder

Hannah Beier for The New York Times

Baseball is filled with traditions and heroes like Satchel Page and the Babe, where defense has the ball and no time limit applies as baseball resembles life with intermittent moments of intense activity interspersed with longer periods of stillness. With this in mind, the notion of only one place on earth, located in NJ in a small river known as the Deleware, is the one essential ingredient able to transform baseballs of shiny entities unable to be grasped into objects ready to be put into play without exception.

LONGPORT, N.J. — A 45-gallon rubber barrel sits in a cluttered garage along the Jersey Shore, filled waist-high with what looks like the world’s least appetizing chocolate pudding. It is nothing more than icky, gooey, viscous, gelatinous mud.

Ah, but what mud. The mud that dreams are made of.

This particular mud, hauled in buckets by one man from a secret spot along a New Jersey riverbank, is singular in its ability to cut the slippery sheen of a new baseball and provide a firm grip for the pitcher hurling it at life-threatening speed toward another human standing just 60 feet and six inches away.

Jim Bintliff and his family have been selling Delaware River mud to Major League Baseball for decades. Here, he fills a bucket in New Jersey.Credit...Hannah Beier for The New York Times

Read the entire NYTime piece to learn more about an arcane craft unknown to this writer until today. :)