Quote:
Originally Posted by thecatspajamas
Brandon, correct me if I'm wrong, but weren't the balls produced for each season based on who was the league president at the beginning of the year, not the beginning of the season, and therefore 1989 ONL balls would bear Giamatti's name, not Bill White's (since Giamatti was still NL president on January 1, and named Commissioner on April 1).
To my mind, this would seem to be a reasonable assumption since there has to be some lead time to the production of the thousands of balls that would be used in games starting in early April. You can't name a new NL president on April 1, and then 2 days later on Opening Day have a truckload of balls show up ready for game use.
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It is amazing where all this research leads and how interesting this is all becoming (to me at least ha). I have been emailing with Big League Baseballs and one thing they sent me was this article:
http://news.google.com/newspapers?id...me+balls&hl=en
In the article it address the issue that was just brought up about producing the balls with the White signature. Basically it looks like Rawlings was trying to get all the teams the new balls by opening day 1989 but they acknowledged Giamatti balls would prob still make it into games. Once again this would lead me to believe seeing a reg season game in July of 1990 would be highly unlikely. However, things were definitely a lot different back in 1990 so who really knows if the Padres just happened to have some extra cases of Giamatti balls that made their way into games in 1990.