They used to use chewing tobacco, then mud made of water and dirt from the playing field, to remove the sheen from new baseballs following the death of Ray Chapman from an errant pitch in the 1920s. It enabled pitchers to get a better grip on the baseball. In the 1930s, Russell Aubrey “Lena” Blackburne, a coach with the Philadelphia Athletics, heard some umpires complaining about having to rub tobacco juice onto the baseballs. As legend has it, Blackburne once went fishing on a Delaware River tributary in New Jersey. He scooped up some mud from the creek, tried it out on a new baseball, and changed a part of the game. Turned out that this mud worked better than anything tried before then. The mud was described as smooth and creamy but with a fine grit. The method invented by Blackburne is still used throughout major league baseball to help the grip of the six or seven dozen new balls prepared for every game. All minor league clubs and a few colleges use the mud, too. Teams go through an average of 3-4 pounds of it each year. In fact, a team will go through about three or four pounds of it every season. This EX-MT photo (4 X 6”) is one of the rarest shots of them all. It is of a smiling Lena Blackburne in his Boston Braves uniform and one of the only known images of him. One corner chip.