Major League Baseball tried a yellow baseball in the late 1930s
Charlie Finley, the owner of the Kansas City A’s, urged Major League Baseball to adopt orange baseballs in the 1960s. Finley liked the novelty of it, but his idea wasn’t new. In the late 1930s, MLB used a non-white baseball in a handful of games.
The idea was hatched by a color engineer named Frederic Rahr, a Harvard graduate who apparently had an obsession with the color spectrum. Rahr said his goal was “to reduce chances of injury to players and spectators; reduce probability of errors; and increase the accuracy of play, but in tennis, table tennis, handball, squash, and even jai alai.” Fair enough.
Rahr determined that the most optimum color for a baseball was yellow. He convinced someone in the National League to try it, and on August 2, 1938, at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn, the yellow baseball was used for the first time in a big league game. This was before night games were prominent, so the yellow ball was not a reaction to evening baseball. Some folks thought it was a great idea considering all of the white shirts that typically filled the ballpark. That afternoon, the Dodgers hosted the St. Louis Cardinals, utilizing a bright ball that Brooklyn pitcher Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons said, “Felt slippery and queer in my hand.”
