New Jersey is famous for lots of things. Taxes, over-crowding, the Turnpike and cranberries are just a few. Oh, and two football teams that still say they are from New York, one a Super Bowl Champion. Who’d have thought magic mud that lurks beneath the surface of hidden swamps in Jersey would be famous as well? Springsteen never wrote about that one.

This isn’t just any mud. It’s Lena Blackburne Baseball Rubbing Mud and not only is it used by every major league baseball team, it’s also in the Hall of Fame. (That must make Pete Rose cry.) R. A. “Lena” Blackburne, a player and coach, discovered the mud which became part of every team’s pregame ball rubbing ritual in 1938. The mud was inducted into the Hall in 1968. Can you imagine that speech? How did it wear a jacket? We’ll let you take over from here with inane mud jokes.

Six harvests a year are dug up from secret holes with every team getting two three-pound vats for their use throughout the year. It’s even aged…for six weeks. Mud needs to age? Isn’t it already ‘old’?

Why this mud? It helps pitchers keep a grip much better than shoe polish and tobacco juice, the method of old before the discovery of this sticky goo. The grip keeps wild pitches at bay…unless they are ordered up for a little retaliation.

Just a little tidbit to chew on as we wait out the final hours before the first pitch in the 2008 World Series. Know that we are hot on the trail of these secret holes. Mud baths are great for the skin, and if this mud is in the Hall of Fame for what it’s done for baseball, imagine what it could do for us?

With our luck Madonna and her new boy toy, Alex Rodriguez, have already found it and now she can sleep in a barrel-full to keep her skin and bones youthful. Or just less skelator-like.

Or maybe they can just rub it all over each other in some ancient Kablahblah ritual.

Baseball thanks you Lena.

Tune in on Thursday for this week’s podcast which will rip into the blowout weekend of football and run the bases with two very deserving teams going for the crown in the most important exhibition series played in major league baseball. We’re going Rambo on the DH rule so we can get a true championship game. Bud Selig, are you listening? The DH takes the shine off the World Series like a vat of misplaced Lena Balckburne Baseball Rubbing Mud.

What else happens Thursday? Voting commences for the Podcast Awards, and The Girls have been nominated for Best Sports Podcast for the third year in a row! We hope we can count on all of you to vote, vote, vote! It’s that time of the year.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 21st, 2008 at 1:19 pm and is filed under Fantoo Blog Home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.