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Ballmakers love home runs

The mighty home runs of Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Hank Aaron and Roger Maris can all be linked to an unassuming building near the railroad tracks in this small town.

Since 1961, workers at the Tennessee Tanning Co have produced the leather that becomes the pristine white surface of an American icon, the major league baseball.

"We do our jobs day in and day out, but it really gives you a neat feeling when you go to a ballpark and watch them hit a ball out of the park and know where that cover came from," general manager Mike Cunningham said.

The city of Tullahoma, halfway between Chattanooga and Nashville, is perhaps more famous for whiskey than baseballs. Tourists regularly visit the George A. Dickel distillery or the nearby Jack Daniel's plant in Lynchburg.

But there aren't any tourists at Tennessee Tanning; making baseballs is a rougher business.

Inside the tannery, which smells like a chemistry lab and a butcher's shop, workers take Holstein cowhides and run them through a five-week process.

The hides typically come from Ohio and Pennsylvania. When they come off the truck in Tullahoma, they are first sliced down the backbone with a boning knife.

Chemicals in rotating wooden drums remove the hair and preserving salts, and then the hides are ``fleshed,'' a process that takes away fat and muscle tissue.

The hides are then treated with tanning agents to create the perfectly white leather of a baseball.

Finally, the leather is dried for several days before being shaved to the correct specification for a major league baseball -- between 0.011cm and 0.014cm. Each hide yields about 16 baseballs.

"It's a very hands-on process that requires a lot of knowledge and skill on the part of all employees to make sure it's done right," Cunningham said.

The 48 employees at Tennessee Tanning handle about 31,000 cowhides each year for Rawlings Sporting Goods. The balls are later stitched together in a plant in Turrialba, Costa Rica.

It is a deceptively simple looking object, but every detail has to be perfect.

"For the integrity of the game, the product needs to be consistent year in and year out," said Matthew Gould, an MLB spokesman. "The end result is the most important thing for us, that every ball meets our exact specifications.

"You can't have one ball being one way in one park, and a different one in another."

The product has an intimate connection with the American people, said Christopher Kimball, dean of Augsburg College, which sits a 1.5km away from the Metrodome in Minneapolis, home of the Twins.

"You can grip it in your hand," Kimball said. "It's a natural thing to pick up a ball and hold it."
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