JUCO baseballs ready for eight day tournament

It's a Wednesday before the tournament tradition. Thirty-dozen baseballs get rubbed to be ready for play over the tournament. The high school baseball players are hired to rub in mud to take away the new, shiny look on the ball while giving the ball some grip.

"We use the same product Major League Baseball uses," said tournament director Walt Bergman. "It's a Lena Blackburne Baseball rubbing mud. It just takes the shine off the ball and gives them all a good grip and gets them all uniform and ready to play. It's always a lot of fun for me being an old coach. We hire high school baseball players and they rub up the baseballs and they chase them throughout the week. Those balls are given back to our programs. high schools, Mesa University and some of the youth teams get to actually use the game balls after that."

During the JUCO World Series, if a fan catches a foul ball, they can turn it in and they will receive a souvenir ball with the JUCO logo on it.