Most of the baseballs pictured in this very special Museum of Baseball gallery are official “prototypes” or test prints. Rawlings has test-printed or test-stamped a lot of variations of logos when finalizing an official MLB commemorative game ball, especially All-Star Games and World Series. More often than not, they’re providing these samples of different logo designs or ink and lace color combos to MLB teams or the commissioner’s office to compare before choosing a final design.
Sometimes Rawlings and other manufacturers, like Spalding, have baseballs that are considered to be prototypes in the more traditional sense: new products or current products with new materials that need to be tested. More specifically, they’re likely experimenting with new cowhide alternatives or internal design changes that were requested by Major League Baseball. You’ll see these in the first dozen or so pictures below such as the Rawlings 5X Center experiment (super-lively ball), and different dyes and leather colors for “night game” baseballs.
And there are also a few examples of genuine errors or misprints, where a word is spelled incorrectly. See if you can spot those below. Two infamous examples are the 1997 “Amercian League” ALDS Division Series and ALCS Championship Series baseballs. We’d guess there were hundreds made that hit the market. Most of these prototype baseballs are extremely rare, however, and some examples here are the only one we’ve seen. Most of these baseballs are highly valued by us obsessed official game ball collectors who love finding something odd or unique.
It’s conceivable that every ASG and World Series ball has at least one test print / prototype variation. Perhaps the same for all other special event game balls. Sometimes it’s just a minute logo size difference. But the highly prized test print variations are usually quite different from their final approved and retailed iterations. In the early years of the modern game ball commemoratives, it’s been said that Rawlings could take ages to decide on a simple ink color for the World Series and Midsummer Classic official baseballs. At least that was probably the case before they settled on alternating red and blue for the first dozen or so years, until 1991 when the Blue Jays broke that pattern with a blue-stamped All-Star Game ball. And in 1992, opportunities for prototypes exploded when our favorite baseball marketing exec for the San Diego Padres made one little design request to Rawlings that would change the course of official game ball history for the Big Leagues and professional leagues around the world.
