Quote:
Originally Posted by w7imel
Yes there was a bad chemical it the hatti balls and like he said the splochyness occured pretty soon after produced. If you find one with no splotches then chances are it will be ok.
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Rawlings has had these issues off and on with different batches of balls over the years. The last huge one was the 2008/2009 specialty Baseballs (ASG, final and inaugural ayankees balls). When I was with Steiner we literally had multiple thousands of these signed by tons of players and within 12 months huge oil spots and splotchyness was occurring on nearly half of the balls due to a parasite that was infesting the core and leather. There was also an additional issue with the printed on ink not setting into the leather correctly for those balls either so the logos are often chipped, dull or display a very poor stamping. It's actually not as easy as you'd think to find clean signed balls for any of those three specialty balls.
Not relevant to this particular example but Rawlings still struggles with these issues.