SEW FAR, SEW GOOD
Marco Rodriguez isn’t your typical baseball fan. In fact, he isn’t much of a fan at all.
Futbol is his game. It’s almost everybody’s game in this pastoral village. They kick the ball around in the streets and in dirt fields, even on the concrete basketball court that seems so out of place in the community park.
If there were a baseball diamond here, well, doubleheaders would still merely be a means of moving the soccer ball down field.
But while residents of Turrialba may be more passionate about soccer, this is a baseball town.
And while baseball isn’t Rodriguez’s passion, it consumes much of his life. The 27-year-old spends up to 48 hours each week sewing the covers on baseballs so people such as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa can try to knock them off.
The two sluggers combined to hit 136 baseballs over the outfield fences at major league ballparks last season. Rodriguez sewed the covers on about 10,000 baseballs last year.
Yeah, it’s safe to assume that this young man is baseballed out. He wouldn’t confess as much during a recent interview in the presence of his boss.
He would say, however, that he was among those who got caught up in last season’s storybook race by McGwire and Sosa to break the 37-year-old home run record held by Roger Maris.
When McGwire’s 62nd homer cleared the fence at Busch Stadium last September, giving the Cardinal slugger a prominent place in baseball lore, Rodriguez smiled.
And when McGwire whacked Nos. 69 and 70 in the last game of the regular season, Rodriguez felt a little bit proud.
“Why?” he says. “Because maybe McGwire has touched one of the balls I have sewn, perhaps even the one he used for his 70th home run.”
Perhaps indeed.
All 70 of those balls were assembled in Rodriguez’s hometown. In fact, every ball hit over the fence, up the middle or into the seats by any major league player was hand constructed at Rawlings de Costa Rica, a sprawling, gate-guarded baseball production facility surrounded by coffee plantations and verdant, rolling hills.
And while he’ll never end up in the Hall of Fame, Rodriguez, you might say, regularly leads the majors in sewing baseballs. He’s one of only a few of about 500 stitchers in the elite “200 Club,” sewing that many balls each week.
He handles between 40 and 60 balls per day, well above the 30 sewn by the average employee. And if you think sewing baseballs is easy money, consider that 108 stitches and seven feet of red cotton thread go into each ball.
To make the seams come out perfectly requires concentration and dexterity. To perform such a monotonous task on a daily basis for so many years . . . it’s no wonder Rodriguez is losing his hair.
Over the eight-plus years he has been working at the Rawlings plant, he has stitched 560,000 feet of thread into the covers of about 80,000 baseballs.
“Most people don’t even last that long,” concedes Doug Kralik, general manager of the factory. “They usually burn out after three or four years, quit and go looking for other jobs, and then after six or seven months they come back looking for their old jobs.”
Beats picking coffee, one might assume.
The majority of the 850 employees at Rawlings de Costa Rica have coffee-picking backgrounds. And unless coffee prices skyrocket, during which times Kralik loses a big chunk of his work force, sewing the covers on baseballs beats climbing steep hillsides under a broiling sun, any day . . . even if you are still working for beans.
Kralik’s employees earn between $223 and $365 per month--which is considerably less than the $4,000 or so Dodger pitcher Kevin Brown makes per pitch.
But such are the disparities between those who play the game and those who turn old cows into baseballs.
Rawlings Sporting Goods, which pulled its manufacturing plants out of Haiti in the late 1980s because of an unstable government, chose Costa Rica for its baseball plant because of a favorable political climate and the availability of cheap labor.
And the salaries, Kralik is quick to point out, are slightly above Costa Rican minimum wage, which is roughly 302 colones, or about $1.20, per hour. “Our workers have to be 18, there is no child labor or exploitation going on here,” he assures. “Rawlings is very much against that.”
Kralik, who lives 15 minutes from the plant “with the jungle as my backyard,” is undoubtedly this city’s biggest baseball fan.
His office is adorned with souvenir baseballs and his walls lined with blown-up photographs of the famous former Yankees--Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle. . . .
He might tell you that DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak will never be broken, or that Hank Aaron’s 755 home runs might fall someday to a man named Griffey.
He will tell you the same thing he told freelance reporters snooping around outside the gates last season during the McGwire-Sosa home run race: that the balls he makes are not juiced and they are no different than they were when he started working for the company 21 years ago.
“We ain’t got no rabbits in here,” he wisecracks.
But Kralik can also share a bit of obscure baseball trivia gleaned from the workplace here in the heart of Central America.
“A lot of people in baseball, even those playing in the major leagues, don’t even realize that the ball is sewn by hand,” Kralik says. “No one really knows that.”
One player does. Orlando Hernandez, while trying to defect from Cuba to the United States two years ago, ended up first in Costa Rica and became friends with Kralik.
Rawlings supplied him with equipment and a training facility in the Costa Rican capital of San Jose and invited him to the factory, where he became the first and only major league player to have tried his hand at sewing baseballs.
Kralik keeps a photograph of a smiling “El Duque” fumbling through the process beneath the glass atop his desk.
“He wanted me to take his picture by all the Yankees here [on the wall] because that was his dream, to play with the Yankees,” Kralik recalls. “Little did we know that a year later he’d be pitching the game of his life [in Game 2 of last season’s World Series] as a Yankee.”
Hernandez returned during the off-season and gave Kralik an autographed cap.
It hangs on the wall opposite a McGwire-model bat, above a bevy of baseballs, including a World Series ball for 1994--when there was no World Series because of a strike.
That was bad news for Rawlings and people like Rodriguez, but good news to cows across America. Or across its heartland, anyway.
Rawlings, which stopped using horsehide three years before it became the major league supplier of balls in 1977, gets its cowhide from dairy farms in Minnesota and Wisconsin after the animals are through producing all that milk, butter and cheese apparently prevalent in the diets of so many a portly baseball player.
The hides are tanned in Tullahoma, Tenn., and shipped here, along with other raw materials, where a work force of men and women goes through a meticulous process of turning them into baseball covers.
The covers are cut and classified into different grades, the “cream of the crop” becoming the pro stocks and the rest going to various commercial markets. The covers are dampened for about an hour, then coated with a latex, water-based glue, and then applied to the baseballs’ centers and sewed on in a large room filled by up to 500 stitchers.
“A lot of relatives work here,” Kralik says. “Brothers and sisters, fathers and mothers. . . . A lot of them come here and sew and then get their education at night and then go on to try to get better jobs in San Jose, et cetera. A few of them do that.”
Sewing baseballs is an education unto itself. The workers go through a three-week training period and are brought along by a supervisor who decides whether they have the talent to stitch perfect seams in a timely manner.
Those who do can earn more money or time off by sewing more baseballs. Incentives begin after an employee sews 130 balls a week. The desired production is 150 balls.
After the covers are sewn on, the balls are inspected for blemishes, rolled for smoothness and put on drying racks for 24 hours. They’re removed from the racks, rolled again, cleaned and inspected again, stamped, measured and boxed.
The factory produces 2 million balls a year, about half of those going to professional teams.
They are shipped from Limon, Costa Rica, to Florida, where they are trucked to Springfield, Mo., and distributed. They end up in sporting goods stores, on Little League diamonds and in college ballparks.
But what really keeps the ball rolling (and cows reeling) is professional baseball.
The average ball in the major leagues lasts about six pitches and teams go through about 800,000 baseballs per season.
“A pro team will get about six dozen balls ready for each game,” Kralik says with a smile. “But that all depends on whether Mark McGwire is playing or not. They get about 10 dozen ready when he plays.”
That, of course, is a ballpark figure.