Baseball owes a huge debt of gratitude to pampered Toledo cows.

                                                            Cow Balls


Baseball, which was America’s favorite pastime until displaced by
professional wrestling and the venerable dwarf toss, owes more to the
much-maligned cow than meets the eye.

As Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire belted a record number of home runs in 1999,
earning their way onto Cherrio boxes and into the ante-room of the White
House, little attention was given to why the baseball is soaring to greater
heights.

The media has concentrated on McGuire’s use of steroid’s and Sosa’s boyish
charm, on the heralded fan sucking sounds practiced by the beer louts in
the bleachers, and on the fact that pitchers lose concentration due to too
much spitting. While these influences could give the ball a bit of a lift,
they cannot fully explain the radical liveliness of major league balls.

Big league baseballs are assembled at the Rawlings plant in Turrialba,
Costa Rico. All materials come from the USA. Ball covers come from sheets
of cow hide whitened by a chemical process at the Tennessee Tanning Co. in
Tullahoma, TN, right across from the slaughterhouse, which is a little
downstream from the feedlot.

The hides come almost exclusively from a dairy farm in Toledo, Ohio because
the leather has fewer imperfections than that from beef cattle that tends
to be pocked-marked and uneven from all the forced feeding and meadow
brawls.

One cow hide will yield abut 96 balls with the most perfectly-stitched
balls going to the majors. Less-than-perfect balls go to the Chicago White
Sox and Cubs. The profoundly uneven balls are sold to Ebay as Mickey Mantle
collectibles. A large quantity go to little league baseball where the
unevenness of the balls makes for sloppy play and give parents something to
yell about.

For the last thirty years Toledo dairy farms have been making major league
hitters look good. Not eager to lose the title of baseball capital of the
world, dairy farmers have concentrated on breeding cattle that produce
lighter, more dynamic and more crease- resistant hides.

One method that has proven successful is a kind of open-air cow aerobics
that teaches the ungainly cow better lateral movement--and stretches the
skin. Another method involves a daily brushing with a lint remover that
keeps cow hides soft and uniform. Though this practice is labor intensive,
it has significantly increased the value--and the area--of the hides.
Well-brushed cows tend to deliver and average of 126.5 balls. In fact these
hides count for more profit than milk and beef production combined.

These strategies--plus generous fields of alfalfa in the region--have given
the baseball much more lift in recent years. And this is the heart of the
controversy. Major league baseball thinks there is some monkey business
going on. Stung by such criticism, the Rawlings company has opened its
doors to journalists from every country except Cuba. The company has
expressed a willingness to forego Toledo cow hides in the interest of
cooling of the game, using  heavier beef hides from Lisbon, Ohio.

The baseball commission has agreed tentatively to this compromise with one
stipulation:

Definitely no bull.