The Great Cover-Up
by Arthur W. Baum
The Saturday Evening Post, May 31, 1947
If any super-Babe ever really makes good the slugger’s habitual threat to knock the cover off the ball, it is going to be a black day for the Pennsylvania town of Perkasie, population 4121. Perkasie is represented, if unnamed, at every American, National, International. AA, Texas. Southern and other league game in which the official major-league ball is used. A bit of Perkasie is on the fast ones, the floaters, the hooks, the hops. Perkasie rides from bat to fence, base to base. Perkasie thinks the most important thing about the horsehide is . . . the horsehide. Perkasie, in short, puts the covers on every ball used in every major-league game and in thousands of others.
Specifically, the family firm of Edward Hubbert & Son, lnc., is the horsehide monopolist. There are three Hubberts in the business, additional Hubberts at three Perkasie homes. They are locally noted for music. Every Hubbert plays, sings and dances. and any three Hubberts at any given time are a vaudeville act.
This year the firm will cover 1,000,000 baseballs -National League balls under the Spalding name, American under the A. J. Reach name - same ball exactly. Each major league will consume 5000 dozens and help out its farm teams with at least a couple of thousand dozens.
Ed Hubbert
The baseballs belong to A. G. Spalding & Sons, and are covered by contract. A very delicate job it is. The horsehide alone is worth more than the inner ball. All stitching is hand done, 108 stitches in each ball, eighty-eight inches of waxed left-twisted twine on each needle. A good stitcher can cover about six baseballs an hour, -and one horse provides four dozen baseball covers. Unless he was branded or liked to scratch himself on barbed wire. Imperfections won't pass an umpire.
The two hour-glass-shaped pieces of hide which cover each ball must match in thickness and have to be shaved to the close vicinity of fifty five thousandths of an inch. If he could maneuver it, which he can't, Ed Hubbert could ruin a home-run king's reputation by seeing to it that he had to hit a ball whose cover was only ten thousandths thicker than regulation. The difference would be worth at least seventy-five feet per hit.
Before 1928 the National League used a cover sixty thousandths of an inch thick and a five-strand thread, against the American League’s fifty thousandths and four-strand thread. This led to controversy over the higher seam and deader action of the National hall. In 1928 a compromise ball was made standard for both leagues, but the lively ball controversy goes on forever, complicated somewhat by the fact that left-field fences vary in distance from home as parks vary. Hubbert doesn't care, and doesn't even know which of the baseball; he covers carries which name. They are all five and one eighth ounces in weight and nine and one eighth inches in circumference. Know where the stitching starts and ends? At the upper right. hand comer of the ball. The Hubberts, and most of the 400 stitchers they have trained in thirty years of covering, know exactly where that is and can pick out those lost ends of waxed cotton twine that seem not to exist. Don't worry about them. They are in there, deep in the hall, and they will be the last to come loose.
The two pieces of each cover come from the cutter with the thread holes spaced by algebraic formula to allow for the varying tensions around the curves. The wound ball inside is covered with a sticky plastic, and when the stitching is completed the seams are flattened.
Thirty years ago Ed Hubbert, then employed by A. J. Reach & Company in Philadelphia, moved to Perkasie and set up his workshop in his kitchen.
Today he has a factory. About 200 people are involved in the great cover-up, some of them working at home on near-by farms.
Every big-leaguer necessarily has his hands on Hubbert's handiwork every time the play is his way. But not one major-league ballplayer has ever been inside the Hubbert factory.