Great Balls of Room Temperature

The Nationals announced plans to incubate their game balls with bald eagles to control their temperature and cut down on the out-of-control home run hitting at RFK Canyon National Monument.

Late last week, Emperor Selig and his dark minions commanded all 30 big-league teams to move toward storing their balls in climate-controlled rooms, like Colorado does. Rawlings, the manufacturer, recommends that balls be stored at 70 degrees and 50 percent humidity.

Which leads BallWonk to wonder, why does Rawlings design its baseballs for San Diego, and not, say, the entire rest of the country where it's not 70 degrees and mild every day?

Also, teams are not allowed to use balls manufactured before 2007 in games this season. Old balls can be used for batting practice. Not that the balls used to be juiced or anything. It's just that the 2007 balls are even more not juiced than the never-juiced balls before, back when it served Emperor Selig's interests for Barry Bonds to hit 143 homers per year. Now that Emperor Selig would rather the Barroid hits fewer than 22 homers per year, the entire league will be using brand spanking new super-unjuiced balls that have been climate controlled to conditions in San Diego, where the Padres have the third-lowest slugging percentage in the league.

The whole thing left the Nationals having to scramble to find a way to regulate their ball-storage conditions. Noting that the local bald eagle population seems to have reached its carrying capacity, with the eagles increasingly tussling for territory along the densely eagled Potomac river, the the Nationals, team mascot Screech, and the U.S. Interior Department came up with the idea of removing eggs from eagle's nests and substituting game balls, which the eagles will incubate until game time.