There 1,000 baseball sewing experts start their day seated in front of a special vice holding a gooey baseball with a gluey leather cover wrapped around it. The leather is already punched with 108 stitching holes and is dampened to make it pliable. Then, using pliers, she jabs the needles into the guts of the ball, traveling back under those stitches, and emerging just beyond the first hole she stitched. She continues sewing in this direction, using a foot-pedal on her vice to spin new sections of seam into reach. When she returns to the neck of the ball, her last stitches dive into the guts again, cross under the neck, come up through a hole and are snipped off.
Pros sew four to six an hour, achieving perfect string tension by feel.
A wooden press rolls the seams flat, and finished balls are stored in a dehumidifying room that shrinks the covers tight and protects the balls from tropical humidity that might make them bloat illegally. All this labor keeps baseballs pricey. In fact winning teams used to keep the used balls at the end of a game, and fans had to give back any they caught in the stands. But they' re a real crowd pleaser. . We put so much energy into making a professional baseball, and its average life is about six minutes.