Posted By:
WilliamI'll throw my hat in the ring. I'm going with early 20th century homemade baseball, or folk art reproduction. The leather color and condition definitely imply newer rather than older and the color of the stitch just doesn't seem right for 19th century. Either way, it's clearly homemade based on the haphazard stitching and the awkward line that the seams follow. Homemade baseballs never adhere to rules that dictate diameter and/or weight. Sometimes you get the size right or the weight right, but rarely both in a homemade ball. For the most part, a "professionally made" lemon peel ball would have been made by a cobbler or some other type of leather worker. By the time that factories got involved, the leagues were using figure eight style baseballs. The lack of standards is why the lemon peel balls are so wildly different in their appearance. People continued to make these style baseballs right up to, and into, the 20th century because they could be made simply from scraps of boot leather and didn't require any tools more complex than a knife and needle and thread.