Geology's Grip on Baseball: A Geological Characterization of Baseball Rubbing Mud
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Major League Baseball (MLB) prepares 156 baseballs for each game by rubbing each ball with a specific mud, sourced from a single company. Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud has been the sole supplier of this mud since the 1950’s (“Our Story”), and is stated to be sourced from a tributary of the Delaware River (“Our Story”). The mud is intended to add grip to slippery new baseball leather, and the company describes the consistency as a “cross between chocolatepudding and whipped cold cream” (“Our Story”). Recent studies have attempted to characterize the aerodynamics of mud-rubbed baseballs, as well as to quantify the frictional forces between fingers and baseballs, but do not adequately address the detailed texture, composition or impact of this specific rubbing mud. Another study by Pradeep et al. (2024) studiesthe rheology of the rubbing mud, but does not adequately characterize the sedimentological characteristics of the mud itself or fully assess the changes to the surface of the baseballs. Presented here is a multi-scale geological characterization of the Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud, and its impact to the surface of a baseball.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".