- 코스타 리카. 축구의 나라.
380만 인구. 15개 야구장. 3000명 야구선수 등록
그것도 니카라구아 이민자들이 주로 야구함.
- 크라릭은 미국 아이오와 남서쪽 크레스톤에서 자랐고, 야구공 제조의 살아있는 제조업체다.
-롤링스 Rawlings 회사는 아이티에서 코스타 리카로 공장을 이동했다.
정치적인 이유로.
-코스타 리카 기업이 메이저 리그 야구공을 생산하기 전, 1990년 일.
- 1994년에 공장이 중국으로 이전했다.
- 코스타 리카 절반-제조업, 하프-코티지 산업이었다. 1900명 중 절반 이상이 자기들 집에서 low-end ball '야구공'을 바느질로 만들었다.
-이제는 575명 노동자들이 공장에서 이 공정을 다 하고 있다.
-300개 실밥 (땀)을 꼬매면 시간당 1.21 달러 임금과 건강 보험과 은퇴 수당으로 시간당 67 센트를 받는다.
-주 5일, 48시간 노동을 하면, 주 90달러, 연간 4681 달러 소득을 올린다.
- 코스타 리카 연간 개인소득은 3950달러이다.
4일에 200개 야구공을 만들어낸다. (Alan Cascante)
미국 메이저 리그 야구선수 연간 평균 임금은 255만 5476 달러이다.
밀워키 내야수 로이스 클레이튼 (150만 달러 연봉)은 이런 임금 격차를 다음과 같이 말했다.
"그들의 경제 체제는 미국과는 다르다. 임금과 노동조건이 정부의 규칙들과 노동법을 준수한다며, 거기 있는 사람들도 여기 메이저 리그 선수들만큼 행복할 것이다"
[내셔널 리그, 아메리컨 리그 볼 차이]
어메리컨 리그 볼은 더 적고, 유연성이 더 떨어진다.
그러나 실제 차이는, 야구공 위에 사용된 잉크 색깔 차이다. 내셔널 리그 야구공은 검정색, 어메리컨 리그 야구공은 파랑색이다.
The Complicated History of Baseball Stitching Machines
NICHOLAS JACKSON
OCTOBER 28, 2010
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As the Texas Rangers battle the San Francisco Giants in the 2010 World Series, the 106th installment of the most American of championship series, we're taking a step back here on the Technology Channel.
This isn't the place for cheer for one team or the other, but it is a place to celebrate one of the most basic components of the game -- the baseball -- and the surprisingly complicated history of attempts at mass producing it.
A professional baseball only lasts for an average of six pitches before being retired, according to Major League Baseball. That means somewhere between five and six dozen balls will be used in every game of this series, which could last for seven games. 500 balls! And each one was hand sewn by Rawlings Sportings Goods, Inc. in Costa Rica, which holds an exclusive contract. That bit of news would give Henry Ford nightmares. Obviously, it would make sense to put together a machine for stitching the leather onto baseballs, but, to this day, nobody has been able to successfully pull it off.
This post was originally published on the Smithsonian Collections Blog as part of a 31-day Blogathon in October for American Archives Month and republished on the National Museum of American History's "O Say Can You See?" blog. It is republished here with permission. It was written by Alison Oswald, an archivist in the museum's Archives Center.
Baseball1.jpg
An Undercover Invention: Baseball Covers and Stitching
For baseball fans everywhere, October is a sacred time. It signals that The Fall Classic or the World Series is almost upon us. With talk of pennant races, batting averages, and future trades, it's hard to escape baseball.
While cruising through the vast holdings of the Archives Center (over 20,000 linear feet of stuff) I recently discovered a hidden gem that many baseball fans will find interesting. It's the fascinating yet little known story of an experimental baseball stitching machine made by the United Shoe Machinery Corporation (USMC) of Beverly, Massachusetts.
I had a vague recollection that baseballs were hand sewn, but surely technology had caught up with this small, but significant cultural object. I guessed wrong. The baseball is a complicated little sphere. I began to delve deeper and what I discovered is that the baseball cover stitching process has resisted mechanization.
The United Shoe Machinery Company was formed in 1899 by the consolidation of the most important shoe machinery firms in the industry -- Goodyear Machinery Company (made machinery for sewing the sole to the upper in welt shoes), Consolidated Hand Lasting Machine Company (made machines for lasting a shoe), and McKay Shoe Machinery Company (made machines for attaching soles and heels).
On May 1, 1905, the new company became officially known as the United Shoe Machinery Corporation. The merger revolutionized shoe equipment manufacturing and the shoe industry itself. With this merger, conflicting patents were eliminated and patents supplementing each other were brought under United's control to permit their prompt combination in a single machine or process.
To ensure efficiency, the new company also continued the practice previously followed by its constituent firms of renting machinery instead of selling it. After the 1899 merger, United grew rapidly.
By 1910, it had an eighty percent share of the shoe machinery market, with assets reaching forty million dollars, and it had acquired control of branch companies in foreign countries. USMC was headquartered in Boston, and its main manufacturing plant was in Beverly, Massachusetts.
Baseball2.jpgUSMC applied the company's expertise in machine technology to other areas of development in order to diversify its product line.
Under the direction of the Research Division, the company engaged in military, computer, and other automation projects.
The EX files or "experimental files" in the collection represent ordinary experimentation related to the development and improvement of shoe manufacturing machinery, and work done in connection with the company's post-World War Two diversification efforts.
The files cover all aspects of an experimental project, from conception through the experimental working out of problems, to the final decision to adopt or not adopt the idea for production.
They also provide information on the functions of the Research Division, the manner in which it operated, and the way in which production decisions were made. In particular, they illustrate the Division's interaction and cooperation with the company's Patent Department.
The files usually contain notes, technical drawings, photographs, and patent information.
Starting as early as 1949, the company undertook three experiments to create a baseball stitching machine: EX#16002, EX#16116, and EX#16279.
These three projects document experimental work in the area of baseballs, specifically of automatic controls, component inserting, and stitching.
The objective of the experimental projects, according to a July 11, 1950 work request, was "to develop a suitable baseball covering equipment for mechanizing to the greatest practical extent both parts of the present discretionary hand lasting-lacing operation."
The full development included an analysis of the hand procedure and how each portion of that work would be handled. The ball starts as a round cushioned cork center called a "pill," then is wrapped tightly in windings of wool and polyester/cotton yarn, and then covered by stitched cowhide.
The process of assembling a baseball involves two types of workers: assemblers (who assemble the core parts of the baseball) and sewers (who stitch the cowhide covers onto the baseball by hand). There are 108 stitches in the cowhide leather of each ball, and each is done by hand.
Research personnel at USMC recognized that this development would be extremely difficult and expensive. Indeed, from July 1950 to November 1961, the total expense of the project was $343,000.
In 1950, the economics of baseball stitching were detailed in a cost chart. The labor rate for lacing was 15 to 20 cents per ball, with a production rate of five to six balls per hour. Clearly, mechanizing would increase the production dramatically.
The initial work order EX#16116 was opened to study and model work necessary to illustrate a method for preparing baseballs prior to stitching. A December 5, 1949 memo from W.L. Abel of the USMC Research Division stated that "very little consideration has been given to the mechanization of conditioning and preparation of baseball covers for machine stitching (this being the case both inside and outside the company).
All attempts that we know of have been principally with the mechanization of the stitching."
Engineers at USMC broke down the problem into five areas: cover assembly (lasting); needle threading; start of stitching (anchoring the first stitch); stitching or lacing; and lastly, final stitching (final thread anchoring).
Previous automated machines exhibited two serious problems: they were unable to start or stop the stitching process without manual assistance, and they were unable to vary the tension of the stitches.
From 1950 to 1955, the basic model work was conducted, resulting in equipment which demonstrated the operations. In 1955, formal design and detailing was initiated to resolve existing engineering and design problems and to record, in drawing form, several pieces of equipment necessary to accomplish the overall objective.
Inventors don't work in isolation, and at USMC the development process was both shared and well documented through notebooks, memos, drawings and photographs. We are fortunate to have this documentation in the Archives Center.
The baseball stitching project was a team effort. A cast of "inventive talent" was involved, principally Sidney J. Finn, who initially brought the idea forward in 1949, Otto R. Haas, and Joseph Fossa. While I found no evidence of it, I like to think that all three men were baseball fans or at least played on the company's baseball team.
W.W. Pritchard of the Research Division noted in January, 1949 that one of the problems is "the lasting of the baseball cover and that the matter should be referred to the inventive talent at Beverly to see if they can come forth with any ideas as to how this might be accomplished."
Haas's earlier work related to baseball sewn covers (US Patent 2,840,024) and an apparatus that sews together the edges of a baseball (US Patent 2,747,529). Joseph Fossa held several patents for baseball sewing apparatus, principally methods for spheriphying baseballs (US Patent 3,178,917) and for methods of assembling by sewing the cover pieces of baseballs (US Patent 3,179,075).
The "inventive talent" of Finn, Haas, Fossa, and countless other USMC engineers all assigned their patents to the United Shoe Machinery Corporation under the direction of a robust patenting programming.
Many of the baseball manufacturers, such as A.G. Spaulding, J. de Beer and Son, MacGregor, Wilson, Lannon Manufacturing, George Young, and Tober Baseball Manufacturing Company, were aware of USMC efforts to create a stitching machine.
While the customer base was limited in number, the potential revenue from a stitching machine could have been substantial. Because of insufficient interest on the part of these baseball manufacturers (at this point the baseball industry was not sufficiently organized to sponsor the development of a machine) and unresolved problems by the company's engineers, the experimental work orders were closed.
In 1972, Robert H. Bliss, Planning Director of USMC, wrote to R.B. Henderson, Vice President of Research and Development at AMF Voit, "Our development program was curtailed in March, 1961 when the Baseball Manufacturers Committee of Athletic Goods Manufacturing Association declined to support further development, and our management made a decision not to further fund the program without industry support."
Bliss further noted that the baseballs stitched on USMC's model machine "were more uniform in appearance than a hand-laced ball, but there was some speculation that a major league pitcher could tell the difference and would prefer a hand-laced ball."
While the economics of the time were considered good, the company could not justify spending more money on the project. Other than increasing the company's knowledge in the area of stitching technology, there was little likelihood that a broad application would result.
Baseballs are still hand sewn. Rawlings Sporting Goods, Inc. (now part of Jarden Team Sports), in Costa Rica has an exclusive contract to produce "professional" baseballs for the Major Leagues.
The amateur baseballs we throw around in the backyard are manufactured elsewhere. Attempts have been made to automate the process of stitching cowhide covers on baseballs, but none has been successful. C.B. Bateman of USMC said in August 1963, "we have a long, long way to go for a commercial piece of equipment to be presented to the trade." And we're still waiting. Play ball!
Alison Oswald is an archivist in the Archives Center at the National Museum of American History.
Images: 1. Willie Mays baseball card, ca. 1955. From the Ronald S. Korda Collection of Sports and Trading Cards; 2. Schematic of mechanism for a baseball cover sewing machine designed by S.J. Finn, March 1949. Drawing by Don Hamm. United Shoe Machinery Company Records, Box 105A, Folder 2.
We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.
NICHOLAS JACKSON is a former associate editor at The Atlantic.
Sewing circles
By BY PHILIP HERSH
TRIBUNE STAFF REPORTER
|
JUL 15, 2003 AT 2:00 AM
The baseball
In the sewing room of the Rawlings factory where major-league baseballs are made, 300 people sat in high-backed chairs arranged in 12 rows of 25 chairs each.
The scene would have looked like a cross between a classroom and a pre-Industrial Revolution factory, if not for the headphones on the ears of many of the workers and the motion of their arms.
Every few seconds, 600 arms opened and closed like butterfly wings, a movement that seemed as choreographed as a ballet.
But its purpose was as paradoxical as the notion of a ballet dancer using only his or her arms.
The movement produced an object that means little to its maker.
At the end of one row sat Oscar Rojas, 27, his arms rhythmically moving apart, then together as he pulled silver and black threads through white cowhide.
카우 하이드 :
Rojas was securing the cover on one of the 2,400 baseballs that were going to Chicago for Tuesday's All-Star Game.
The threads reflect the colors of the White Sox, host to the game.
The idea of butterfly wings reflects Costa Rica, land of la pura vida, which uses the colorful insects as a national emblem, raises them for export and creates habitats for them to delight visitors to national parks like the La Paz waterfall gardens in the volcanic mountains outside San Jose.
Without that movement there would be no symbolic relationship between this Central American country and the North American stadiums where the balls will one day fly.
The posters of Alex Rodriguez, Tony Gwynn, Ken Caminiti and Mike Piazza that hang in front of the sewing room have no significance for most of the workers, who rarely have the time to look at at them.
When the names of sluggers Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds were mentioned to Rojas, his response was a quizzical look.
"Never heard of them," Rojas said.
Sewing floor supervisor Yunerth Garcia knew who Sosa is but did not recognize the name of Bonds or White Sox All-Star Magglio Ordonez.
Forty years ago, Costa Rica had a few decent professional baseball players, only one of whom got as far as Triple A.
With every passing year, Costa Rica has become a soccer country, pura vida and simple.
The nation of 3.8 million inhabitants has just 15 baseball fields, only two with seats for spectators, and only 3,000 registered players, from kids to adults.
Nearly three-fourths of the players on the eight teams in a first-division league and the 93 teams in eight regional leagues scattered around the country are immigrants from Nicaragua, according to Rodrigo Vargas, president of the Costa Rican Baseball Federation.
The country's other link to baseball is primarily as a haven for the Cuban defectors like Orlando "El Duque" Hernandez, who stayed in Costa Rica while awaiting professional contract offers.
Cities like Turrialba, which has no team, rarely had seen baseball played before Rawlings moved there--and rarely have seen it since.
All the materials that go into the balls are manufactured in the United States and shipped to Turrialba for assembly.
Beisbol is made, not nurtured here.
"We know how to make this toy, but we don't know how to play with it," said Francisco Bermudez, longtime manufacturing manager for Rawlings of Costa Rica.
Many of the men who play best with the ball don't know how it is made.
Cubs pitcher Mark Prior said he figured everything was done by machine, an idea shared by all but one of several players and coaches questioned about it during a recent Cubs-Brewers series.
"Making them is an art, it really is," said Doug Kralik, former manager of Rawlings' operations in Costa Rica.
Eden-like setting
Kralik organized baseball clinics for the children of Turrialba, holding them on soccer fields.
About 200 kids showed up for the first one, he said.
Plans to build a baseball diamond never materialized, and the sport disappeared before it ever gained a foothold.
"Costa Rica never was invaded by Marines, so it never got baseball," Kralik said.
Kralik was gazing out from the terrace of his rented house in the Santa Rosa neighborhood of Turrialba.
Two green parrots flew past, followed soon after by two parakeets. An oropendula, with its startlingly yellow tail, flitted through the trees. Birds of paradise were ready to flower.
The crimson tassle of ginger flowers already was in bloom. No wonder a nearby town is called Paraiso. If this isn't the Garden of Eden, it must be a suburb.
Distant hills were topped by the low, heavy clouds of the rainy season. In the near distance, across a run of small hills and into the Turrialba Valley, sit the white buildings of the Rawlings factory Kralik had run from its opening in 1986 until early June, when he and the company parted ways after 25 years.
Kralik, who grew up in the southwest Iowa town of Creston, is a living institutional history of baseball manufacturing.
He also was involved with the work during some of the 12 years Rawlings made its baseballs in Haiti.
Once upon a time, when the covers were horsehide and avoiding high domestic labor costs hadn't become SOP (standard overseas procedure) for most U.S. companies, they were made in the United States.
Rawlings moved to Costa Rica from Haiti because it offered more political stability.
The factory was located in out-of-the way Turrialba, a two-hour drive from the international airport in San Jose and a three-hour drive from the country's major port, Limon, because the government made it attractive for Rawlings.
Costa Rica wanted an economic boost for an area that became a backwater when it was bypassed in the mid-1980s by the new highway from the capital, San Jose, in the country's mountainous center, to Limon on the Caribbean coast.
Beachgoers and truckers bringing goods to Limon no longer stopped at the restaurants and hotels in Turrialba, a city of 30,000 where one still can find people riding horses into its center.
Picking coffee and harvesting sugar cane were virtually the only jobs left, and those began going to itinerant Nicaraguans who worked for less money.
Rawlings was sold this year to sporting goods manufacturer K2, sparking speculation the new owner would move its production of major-league baseballs to an Asian country with even lower labor costs.
"Costa Rica is important to Rawlings," insisted John Rangel, chief financial officer of K2.
"Making baseballs is all about consistency. Major League Baseball has a large investment in history and records.
We are anxious not to do anything that brings those records into question.
The Costa Rica operation is an integral part of that."
The factory began with 50 workers, including some Haitians who served as teachers.
It was 1990 before the Costa Rica operation produced its first major-league balls.
Rawlings employed as many as 1,900 in Costa Rica until the manufacturing of low-end balls was moved to China in 1994.
It once was half-manufacturing, half-cottage industry in Costa Rica: More than half the 1,900 workers were involved in sewing the low-end balls in their homes.
All the work now is done by approximately 575 workers in the factory.
Three hundred stitch baseballs for $1.21 an hour in wages and another 67 cents an hour in health and retirement benefits.
Based on a five-day, 48-hour week, the pay and benefits are $90 per week or $4,681 per year.
The country's per-capita annual income is $3,950, according to the Canadian International Development Agency.
Stitchers also work by number of baseballs sewn.
A worker who reaches 175 can leave after three days and be paid for a full week. At 162, the worker can leave 5 1/2 hours early Friday.
Bermudez said fewer than 10 of the 300 stitchers are able to leave after three days and most experienced workers sew 34 or 35 balls a day.
A stitcher works for three years before being allowed to make major-league balls.
Until then, they sew balls for colleges, minor leagues and high schools.
Alan Cascante, 26, has sewn baseballs for eight years.
Once he finished 200 balls in four days.
Many of them will have been used by major-leaguers whose average salary this year is $2,555,476, according to the Associated Press.
An interpreter asked Cascante about working for peanuts and Cracker Jack, $58.08 a week in actual salary, compared with the ballplayers.
"Of course, that is not fair," Cascante said.
"But we can live well on that. We never made that working in the fields."
Prior, who the AP says makes $1.45 million a year, responded with a poignant "unbelievable" when informed about the salaries of those who make the balls he throws so effectively.
Milwaukee infielder Royce Clayton ($1.5 million) also appreciated the irony.
"Of course, I sympathize with anyone who is unhappy in their job, but who is to say those people are unhappy?" Clayton said.
"Their economic system is different from ours. As long as the wages and working conditions are in compliance with government regulations and labor laws, I'm sure there are people there just as happy as people here making millions."
Kralik said there was just one thing guaranteed to make the workers unhappy.
"They don't realize a pitcher makes maybe $11 million a year, and they could care less," he said.
"They are proud of their work. If someone said the balls were bad, they would be upset."
Another myth
Cubs pitcher Mike Remlinger said he once wanted to make a bet with Gene Orza, associate general counsel of the Major League Baseball Players Association.
"Give me 10 balls," Remlinger would say to Orza, "and I can tell you by feel which ones are American League balls and which are National League balls."
Orza never took Remlinger up on it.
"The balls in the American League were lower and wound tighter," Remlinger said.
"There are still variations in balls, nothing significant, but with a pitcher holding balls all day long, you can feel them.
"Some days, the ball feels big. Some days, it feels like a golf ball.
You pick up one and then you pick up another and hope it feels small, too. When all the balls feel that way, you know it's going to be a good day."
Presumed differences between the AL and NL balls are just one of the major-league myths that have sprung up, according to Rawlings, which has made the balls for both leagues since 1977.
Rawlings Vice President Ken West said the only difference was the ink used on the ball--black for the NL, blue for the AL.
The balls have been similar, with the signature of Commissioner Allan Selig, since 2000.
Remlinger said he has weighed balls and found some heavier than others. That is possible.
Specifications for the estimated $11 million of balls Major League Baseball and its 30 teams buy each year from Rawlings allow for a quarter-ounce difference in weight (5 to 5 1/4 ounces) and a quarter-inch difference in circumference (9 to 9 1/4 inches).
"College balls are very different," Prior said. "College seams were really high, especially before they rubbed them [with mud]. It gave you a better break and made it easier to hold the balls when you were sweating."
Kralik said 90 percent of the 3,400 dozen "professional" balls produced each week in Costa Rica would be good enough for major-league use.
Between 90,000 and 100,000 dozen a year go to major-league teams for game and practice use, according to West, who said the rest are sold at retail.
A major-league ball purchased through Rawlings' Web site costs $14.99 plus $4.98 shipping.
Based on a 162-ball week, a stitcher would earn 38 cents per ball.
There are humidity and temperature controls and quality controls for every ball at every phase of the operation.
Weight, tension and circumference measurements are taken after each of the four stages in the winding operation.
The stitchers also measure the balls. Supervisors inspect the stitches after the balls go through a machine that flattens the seams.
The balls are scanned to see if a sewing needle or other foreign substance was inadvertently left inside.
Further inspection occurs as the balls are cleaned, stamped with the MLB logo and Selig's signature and packed for shipping by truck to Limon, then boat to Port Everglades, Fla., then rail to Rawlings headquarters in Springfield, Mo.
Finally they are sent by truck and rail to major-league teams and stores.
Random testing is done in Costa Rica and Missouri with a pitching machine and white ash backboard (the wood used to make most bats) to see if the ball's bounce-back distance meets established criteria.
The consistency is striking, especially condering that people, not machines, do so much of the work.
"They tried to make a machine to sew baseballs, but they didn't realize how many different leather characteristics there are," Kralik said.
"A person is able to compensate for that."
The sheets of leather, which have come since 1961 from Tennessee Tanning in Tullaloma, Tenn., are evaluated for softness, porosity, stretching, shadowing and other marks by workers who cut it by machine into figure-eight-shaped pieces, two of which cover each ball.
The cutters try to match all those characteristics in the two pieces that cover each ball.
Under the cover are one wind of a polyester-cotton blend white thread and three winds of red-flecked gray yarn that have been supplied since 1984 by D&T Spinning in Ludlow, Vt.
At any point in the winding process, a ball that is not meeting specifications can be unwound to start again with the core, or "pill." There are three workers on each of seven winding lines at the factory, with one on each line running two machines.
Rawlings does not allow photographs in the winding room to conceal the details of the machines, which the company invented.
The pill, made since 1948 by Muscle Shoals Rubber Co. in Batesville, Miss., looks and reacts like a Superball until it is wrapped.
It has a center of cork and rubber covered by two layers of rubber, then coated with a glue so the yarn will adhere. Once wrapped, the balls also are coated with latex cement to hold the covers in place as they are stitched.
"The difference in balls today, I think, is that the balls were sewn together and now they are glued together," said Cubs manager Dusty Baker.
That counts as another myth.
The covers are held together by the 108 v-shaped lock stitches put in each ball by a single person. The stitches are not cut or tied off. Pressure and tension created by pulling a stitch through part of the ball, not an adhesive, keeps the cover on.
"I've noticed there are no knots," Prior said.
What about the knotty problem of how many more balls are being smacked beyond fences, walls and light towers in recent years?
Smaller stadiums, poorer pitching, performance-enhancing substances (and cork-enhanced bats?) all have contributed to the power surge, but few seem to accept those factors as sufficient explanation. The conventional wisdom is the ball has been juiced to bring back fans ailenated by the 1995 strike, just the way evidence suggests it was after the Black Sox scandal of 1919.
"Some people said we were putting uranium in the baseballs," offered a smiling Bermudez.
The increase in home runs during the first part of the 2000 season led Major League Baseball to ask scientists from the University of Massachusetts-Lowell Baseball Research Center to examine the performance of balls used in 1999 and 2000.
Their tests concluded that the balls had not changed between those seasons.
Four months later, University of Rhode Island scientists came to a different conclusion in their independent research.
They found the cores of major-league balls from 1995 and 2000 bounced higher than balls from the 1960s and 1970s and contained other materials that could make them much livelier.
"The pills have never changed, and all the [other] materials have never changed," said Rawlings Vice President West.
The only noise in the stitching room of Rawlings' Costa Rica factory is the low hum of fans blowing.
Supervisors move silently through the aisles, collecting finished balls and passing out covers kept supple with moisture until just before they are distributed.
Fewer than five major-league players are known to have visited the factory, most recently Hernandez before his rookie year with the Yankees.
Most are surprised to learn of the handmade craftsmanship involved.
"It must be a tremendous amount of work . . . good work," said Milwaukee Brewers coach Rich Dauer, a longtime major-league infielder.
Oscar Rojas said he once sewed 67 balls in a day.
When he started, four years ago, Rojas said he stabbed every part of his hands with the needle
. Now he pulls the needle securely through the leather and the ball, occasionally using an awl to ensure that the stitching is even.
Like all the better stitchers, Rojas is allowed to listen to music, and his choice is romantic.
One can assume even rap would not distract him, just as visitors with questions did not.
Rojas' arms took flight, opening and closing with an effect and regularity a butterfly would envy.
He was making one of the balls Barry Bonds will try to hit in the All-Star Game.
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PART 4 OF 4.
FRIDAY: THE CAP
SUNDAY: THE GLOVE
