At first glance, baseball and mud don't seem to go well together. Around here, too much mud means that the Phillies, the Blue Rocks, the Trenton Thunder, or the Camden Riversharks may have to postpone a game. But there's another less well-known connection between mud and baseball, and it has a few local angles.

You see, every baseball used in a professional game is "rubbed down" beforehand with a tiny amount of a mud-like substance to make the ball's shiny leather cover easier to grip. In most cases, this "mud" is a special brand called "Lena Blackburne Rubbing Mud" - the leagues actually buy this mud before the season and then distribute it to the teams. Lena Blackburne was a Philadelphia Athletics coach who first discovered back in 1930 that this special mud can "roughen up" a ball without discoloring or scratching its cover too much.

Another local angle to this story revolves around where the mud comes from. Officially, the current owner of the mud business keeps the location a secret. But word is out unofficially that Lena Blackburne Rubbing Mud is collected each year, at low tide, from a tributary of the Delaware River near the town of Palmyra in New Jersey, across the river from Philadelphia.