This post is about balls.

Baseballs. Keep your shorts on.

I just finished watching the longest game in World Series history, both in terms of innings played and total time played (18 innings and 7 hours, 20 minutes). The game ended in dramatic fashion with a walk-off homer by Dodgers’ infielder Max Muncy in the bottom of the 18th inning. And while it was fun being a part of history, a game that long gives a guy some time (a LOT of time) for his mind to wander. During the game, I thought about a lot of things, including the aesthetic properties of lime Jello, the perplexing density of fruitcake, the collective intelligence of bird flocks, the unwanted accumulation of belly button lint, and eventually…balls.

Baseballs. Reel it in, folks.

Interestingly, just before the end of the 14th ending, announcer Joe Buck said 336 balls had been used in the game so far. By way of comparison, most 9-inning games see about 100 baseballs used.

How do they use that many, you ask? There are a variety of things that lead to a baseball being replaced, including:

• A new ball is needed each time a ball is fouled off or drilled for a home run.
• Each time a ball is foul tipped, the ball is replaced.
• Pitchers request new balls for any reason they like. Seventies Tigers’ pitching phenom Mark “Bird” Fidrych used to demand a new ball when—after speaking to it (yes, he talked to the ball between pitches)—he determined that the ball “had hits in it.”
• Balls are tossed into the stands by players.
• Balls are carried off the field by players at the end of innings.
• The home plate umpire exchanges a “used” ball for a new ball without explanation.
• Wild pitches and hits also lead to a replacement of the ball.

In fact, Major League Baseball spends about $5.5 million each year on official game balls. In total, between 900,000 a cool 1 million baseballs are used by the league each season. Each team uses about 30,000 during practices, and about 200,000 are used for games.

And balls aren’t just taken out of their shipping boxes and tossed into a game either. Before each game, an employee of the stadium massages each ball with a special rubbing mud to break them in. (Yes, the balls are lovingly massaged before each game.) Once the balls have had their spa treatment, they are checked by the umpires, and the umpires take ball inspection seriously. Any ball deemed, I dunno, not glorious enough, is removed from the stash of game balls for that game.

To finish this dissertation on balls, let’s talk about the balls themselves. Each baseball contains a rubber-coated cork core that is wrapped in three layers of wool yarn and then wound with cotton or polyester yarn. The core is coated with latex adhesive, which is then wrapped with cowhide. Two 108-stitch series of red cotton stitches seal the ball. Each baseball is stitched by hand using 88 inches of red wax thread.

When unwound, the yarn wrapping from of one baseball is more than one mile long. Baseballs used by MLB are made in Costa Rica. The raised stitches on the ball are what catch air and cause the ball to change direction during flight. The pitcher uses different grips, release points, and pitching motions to put different spins on the ball as it travels 60 feet 6 inches from the mound to the plate. These grips and spins allow the pitcher to determine the flight of the ball, creating a variety of pitches, such as the two-seam fastball, four-seam fastball, sinker, slider, curve, knuckleball, and cutter.

I was unable to determine the exact number of balls used in tonight’s game, but assuming the number of balls used per inning continued at the same rate as the first, ahem, 14 innings, 432 total balls were used (average of 24 per inning) in tonight’s 18-inning slog.

As SB Nation so eloquently put it, I might be fundamentally broken for having stayed up to watch every pitch of the game when I didn’t have a proverbial horse in the race, but dammit, I feel like I’m a part of something.

And it gave me a chance to talk with you fine folks about balls.