Before McGwire, Sosa Hit It Out, Velquez Stitches It

For three years, Zaira Velquez sat in her modest living room and stitched Rawlings baseballs bound for the majors.

But in 1994, the company suddenly forbade its employees from working at home, preferring to consolidate the production of all the balls in a clump of tan buildings on the outskirts of this mountain town.

Did Rawlings make the switch so it could somehow juice the balls? Velquez wouldn’t know.

“I’ve never seen baseball before,” the 27-year-old said. “They could be playing it there in my house and I would have to ask them, ‘What’s going on?”’

Although all the balls used in the major and minor leagues have rolled out of Rawlings’ unassuming factory here since 1989, much of the game itself remains a mystery to almost everyone in this working-class town of 20,000 people, about 110 miles southeast of the capital of San Jose.

There’s no company softball team here. In fact, there are no baseball fields for hundreds of miles, and no sporting goods stores in town where the workers might see the fruits of their labor.

The factory’s signature red Rawlings logo--a symbol that for millions of Americans conjures up freshly cut grass, hot dogs on a July evening and the crack of a bat--means nothing more than a dependable paycheck here.

The workers are unaware of the controversy that rages around the majors about their baseballs and how they are flying out of ballparks at record rates. That perhaps some sinister conspiracy has been hatched to make the balls livelier, or even tougher for pitchers to grip, to increase the number of crowd-pleasing home runs.

One thing is certain, though. They’re all sure no one’s doctoring the balls.

“It’s always been the same process since all the balls have been made here. They haven’t told us to change anything,” said Marianela, one of hundreds of Rawlings’ ball-sewers.

“Each ball is checked so carefully before it goes on the truck, I don’t think a ball that’s been changed would make it,” said the woman, who did not want her last name used.

The debate has reached such heights that baseball has dispatched its executive vice president for operations, Sandy Alderson, to tour the factory Monday with Ted Sizemore, Rawlings’ executive vice president and a former major leaguer.

From afar, the factory looks as if it were built in a kind of massive baseball amphitheater.

It sits snugly in a valley ringed on all sides by a stadium of lush green hills, its grandstands a collection of ramshackle pastel houses built for the workers of a nearby coffee plantation, and a cemetery with porcelain crypts that cut a presence not unlike bleachers.

The factory can be reached by a winding mountain road that is all but impassible during the rainy season.

The secret of how the St. Louis-based Rawlings company makes the balls can be just as impenetrable: The closely guarded facility is off-limits to visitors and the news media, although a special tour is being arranged after the visit by Alderson and Sizemore.

Except for the logos of the American and National leagues, which are stenciled on the side of the factory, and a yellowing 1988 All-Star game sticker plastered inside the cubicle where guards keep an eye on the perimeter, there’s no sign of baseball at all.

Marianela heads to work wearing a skateboarder’s black gloves to protect against pricks and cuts from putting the 108 stitches in each ball, and dons headphones to fight off boredom. She says most of the time, sewers are allowed to go home for the week after they’ve successfully stitched 155 balls.

“If you’re too slow, or the balls you make have flaws in the stitching, they won’t let you listen to music,” she said.

After three years at the factory, Marianela says she can sew 55 balls a day. For this, she and other workers earn about $51 a week.

All that time and effort for a ball that may last only one pitch in a big-league game, only to get tossed aside if it is scuffed by bouncing in the dirt.

Ronald Espinoza, one of the very few sewers who knows how to play baseball, said juiced-ball conspiracy theorists are overlooking the most obvious explanation for the increase in home runs.

“The hitters are just getting stronger,” said the 18-year-old, whose most prized possession is an autographed ball he got when New York Yankees ace Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez took a VIP tour of the factory.

“All you have to do is look at Mark McGwire,” he said.

According to those who spend 10-hour days producing thousands upon thousands of baseballs a week, the process begins with a black bouncy rubber core -- known in the business as “the pill.”

It is then put through a series of machines to wrap it with three kinds of string. From there, it goes to a long sewing table where hundreds of workers nudge each stitch through precut grooves on leather pieces cut to fit each ball.

A quality-control sector then puts the ball through a battery of tests, including being smashed with a machine to test its temperature after sustaining the blow. Those balls found to be up to snuff are stamped with commissioner Bud Selig’s signature, boxed and stacked on small green trucks to be whisked away to the north and destinations like Wrigley Field, Fenway Park and Camden Yards.

While those who stitch the baseballs with the long, curved needles see the finished product, others in the factory don’t.

“Once it leaves our machines wrapped in stitches, I don’t know where it goes,” said Eric Brenes, one of about 20 workers who run the machines that help form the guts of each baseball. “The only time I have ever seen a finished baseball is on TV.”

But even if Brenes did see one, it might not be easy to tell if something has been done to the baseball to make it more hittable.

That’s why, in addition to Monday’s high-level visit, major league baseball has commissioned University of Massachusetts mechanical engineering professor Jim Sherwood to test the balls to ensure they meet the specifications spelled out in the rule book.

All the fuss about the surge in homers eludes some here.

“What’s bad about home runs? That’s what I can’t understand,” said Edgar Mata, Turrialba’s mayor. “The game is getting more exciting and baseball fans are worried? It just doesn’t make sense to me.”