North Texas company's machine uniformly rubs mud on baseballs

A Farmers Branch company may have a fix for a persistent problem -- cheating pitchers. Their Ball Mudder could change America's game.

FARMERS BRANCH, Texas - Major League Baseball has been dealing with an issue involving pitchers using illegal substances. An invention made by a North Texas company could clear up the muddy situation.

MLB umpires have been cracking down recently on pitchers using foreign substances on the ball, threatening suspensions for violators.

But a company in Farmers Branch thinks it might have a solution – the Ball Mudder.

The new machine will uniformly rub mud onto a baseball, taking the guesswork out of the job that’s currently done by clubhouse attendants. They rub the game balls with mud before each game to help the pitchers get a better grip.

"Each ball is rubbed before each game and there’s approximately 240 balls used for every game. And MLB was having trouble with each market doing them differently," said Phil Small, Ball Mudder Inc.’s founder.

Randy Haden, the company’s IT director, knows the machine inside and out. It can get the job of rubbing 240 balls with mud in under an hour.

"The ball falls into one of six positions in the processing arms of the machine. So the interior has six places for balls to be mudded all at the same time," Haden said.

"Everybody agrees that the pitchers want a grip on the ball. I think the hitters want that. The pitchers want that. Everybody wants that. But we are trying to take out the bad information which is that these balls were rubbed three days ago. Our machine will send everything, all the information to the cloud as to when that ball was rubbed. It will be serialized with a number and a picture of every ball," Small said.

But how does it apply to MLB’s new policing of pitchers? The machine can also be set to detect if those foreign substances are on the ball.

"So if a pitcher has a foreign substance, as long as we have a list of those substances we can tell the umpire by a dot of discoloration an illegal foreign substance was put on that ball," Small said.

Obviously, the inventors of the Ball Mudder would love to move beyond the current prototype and get the machine into every big league ballpark.

"We believe that we’ve made a machine, we’ve invented a machine strictly for MLB at this time. We hope that they’ll come around, be in touch with us and let us know that this works," Small said.