Major League Baseball will be experimenting with pre-tacked baseballs at a “handful” of Triple-A games over the final 1 ½ weeks of the minor league season.
MLB executive vice president of baseball operations Morgan Sword told Baseball America on Thursday that select teams in the highest level of the minor leagues will play with balls that have a different substance applied to help with better grips. Baseballs currently get rubbed down with mud prior to games.
The experiment goes hand-in-hand with MLB’s crackdown of sticky substances, which involve routine in-game checks of pitchers’ gloves.
Only a select group of Triple-A games will use the ball given the short supply of pre-tacked baseballs this late in the season.
Yahoo Sports reported last month that the league sent a prototype pre-tacked ball to some big-league players for feedback.
–Field Level Media
