PHILADELPHIA — Professional baseball has a strange pre-game ritual that’s been happening for almost 100 years: rubbing each pristine white baseball with special mud harvested from a secret ...

The magic mud soon spread through baseball’s American and then National leagues. Bintliff, 60, said he and his wife, Joanne, now sell about 2,000 pounds of mud each year, to every MLB team as ...

Lena Blackburne Baseball Mud is named for the Philadelphia Athletics coach. Back in the 1930s, he used mud from his favorite fishing hole to add grip to slippery new balls after a batter died.

The unique properties of baseball's famed "magic" mud have never been scientifically quantified—until now. In a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at the ...