When did umpires in major league baseball start taking balls pitched in the dirt out of the game?

Answer 1

Umpires remove balls that are blemished, scuffed, dirty, cut, or marked from game play. They also remove balls that pitchers or catchers request to be removed for any reason as a courtesy. (They also may bring balls previously removed back into the game if the blemish is minor.)

Meanwhile, players routinely toss balls into the stands after between-inning warm ups, after catching a fly on the 3rd out, and so on.

As a result, it is not uncommon to go through 50 or more baseballs in a professional game.

This custom is a relatively new one, beginning in the transition from the "dead ball"era to the modern era about 1920. The Baseball analyst Bill James has argued that the emphasis on removing unfit balls was an important part of this transition. Until then, umpires would leave the same ball in play if they could, and players tended to deface the ball whenever they could to harm the batters' vision of the pitched ball so they couldn't hit as well. Balls hit into the stands had to be returned by fans (until 1921).

In August, 1920 star shortstop Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians was struck and killed by a pitch, reportedly a dirty ball he just couldn't see well. "From then on," James writes, "much more effort was made to keep a clean fresh ball in play."