What is the lifespan of a baseball in Major League Baseball?

The average lifespan of a baseball in a major league game is seven pitches. When that ball hits a bat or the dirt, it’s done—relegated to batting practice or sent off to a minor league team.

Rawlings Sporting Goods Company must keep the balls coming. As the official baseball supplier of Major League Baseball, the company produces some 4,000 dozen baseballs per week—2.4 million balls per year—for use in games, practice and as memorabilia.

The leather that covers those balls comes from Rawlings’ wholly owned tannery operation, Tennessee Tanning, which gets the majority of its cow hides from Cargill’s beef plant in Wyalusing, Pennsylvania.

Baseball leather is aniline tanned; in other words, we don’t put any sort of finish on it,” said Mike York, general manager of Tennessee Tanning. “What you see on the baseball is actually the cow hide. We don’t cover up any imperfections, so it has to be perfect.”

Holstein dairy cows are traditionally the best for leather because they have thinner hides,” said York. “And we try to get our Holsteins from as far north as we can, where the winters are longer and the summers are shorter.”

Shorter summers means fewer opportunities for bug bites or impetfections on the hide. “We are held to pretty tight specs by Major League Baseball,” York said, explaining that there are different grades of baseballs, but those used in the major league are the highest grade.