Okay, so I got curious the other day about something seemingly simple: how much does a Little League baseball weigh? I mean, I’ve held a ton of them, my kids play, but I never really thought about the actual weight. So, I decided to dive in and figure it out.
First, I grabbed one of the baseballs we had lying around from my son’s last season. Feels pretty standard, you know? But “feels” isn’t very scientific, right? So I went and got my trusty kitchen scale – the one I usually use for, like, weighing baking ingredients or whatever.
I zeroed out the scale and plopped the baseball on it. The first one I weighed came in at 5.1 ounces. Alright, not bad. But one baseball isn’t a very big sample size, is it? Gotta get more data!
So I went and rounded up a few more baseballs from the garage. We had a bucket full of ’em, some more used than others. I weighed a couple more, and they were all pretty close, like between 5 and 5.2 ounces. Seems like there’s a pretty tight range they aim for.
But then I remembered we also had a bag of those softer Tee-Ball baseballs for when my youngest was just starting out. I dug those out too, figuring they might be different. And yeah, they were a bit lighter, closer to 4 ounces, which makes sense ’cause you don’t want a tiny kid getting smacked with a super heavy ball, right?
After my little experiment, I did what everyone does – I hopped online to see what the “official” word was. Turns out, my little home experiment was pretty spot on!
- Most Little League baseballs: They’re supposed to be between 5 and 5.25 ounces.
- Tee-Ball baseballs: These are lighter, around 4 to 5 ounces.
What I Found
So there you have it. My totally unscientific, but still pretty accurate, experiment confirmed that Little League baseballs are in that 5 to 5.25-ounce range. It’s kind of cool to know that something so common, something we handle all the time, has these specific standards. And it made me realize how much thought goes into even the simplest things in sports, even for the little kids!
Also, I found out that the size of a Little League baseball is around 9 to 9.25 inches in circumference, just in case you were wondering!
And by the way, it was a interesting experiment for me. It was a good memory for me to do this experiment with my kids. By the way, the kids were very excited when doing this experiment. I think I will do similar experiments in the future.
