For years, I've advocated playing with a less-lively baseball at Coors Field. It never occurred to me that Major League Baseball might allow the Colorado Rockies to simply take the regulation baseballs and make them less lively.

But as you've heard, that's exactly what the Rockies are doing, by keeping the balls damp in a humidity- and temperature-controlled room. As Colorado general manager Dan O'Dowd told me Wednesday, "Over the years we've noticed that as the summer moves along, the balls began to feel different, to dry up. We ran some tests last season, and we found that the balls didn't even meet Major League Baseball's guidelines. So we built a chamber that mimics the conditions of the Rawlings plant where they store the baseballs after they come over from Haiti."

The Rockies are certainly not the first team to alter the state of their baseballs. There are stories about the Pirates and the Phillies freezing baseballs in the 1920s, and it's said that Connie Mack employed similar shenanigans (which doesn't exactly square with his image).

The most famous example involves the Chicago White Sox in the 1960s. The following story is related by Jerome Holtzman and George Vass in Baseball, Chicago Style (Bonus Books, 2001):

It began ... in 1965 when the Sox were in Detroit for a four-game series. Tommy John was pitching for the Sox and noticed the baseballs had been tampered with.

"All the balls I got that day were like cue balls, hard and slick," John recalled. "And the seams were so low, almost nonexistent. When you're a sinkerballer you can't sink the ball without seams."

John relayed the information to manager Al Lopez who told him to bring a ball into the dugout after every inning. According to John's recollections, Lopez said, "That's okay. We'll get them when we get back to Comiskey Park."

Lopez summoned Gene Bossard, a second-generation groundskeeper who knew all the tricks. Bossard understood what had to be done and began storing boxes of balls in a small, windowless brick-walled room. He installed a humidifier. In two weeks the balls were soaking wet, moist from the humidity.

... In the four-game series at Detroit, the Tigers had hit 13 home runs ... In the ensuing four-game series at Comiskey Park from July 30 through August 2, the Tigers were swinging at the doctored balls. Suddenly, they were shorn of their power. Their longest hit in the entire series was a double.

Many of the specifics of this story check out. In 1965, the Tigers and White Sox played one four-game series in Detroit: single games on July 23 and 24, and then a doubleheader on Sunday the 25th. The Tigers won three of the four games, scoring 32 runs in the series. The Sox scored 21 runs, for a total of 53 by both teams in the series.

One week later, the Tigers arrived in Chicago for a five-game series at Comiskey Park. The White Sox won three of the games and, more to the point, the two teams combined for only 17 runs in the five games.

Interestingly enough, though, even including that series against the Tigers, scoring at Comiskey Park actually increased (if just slightly) after Bossard began soaking baseballs. From the beginning of the season through July 19, there were 6.39 runs per game at Comiskey Park; from July 30 through the end of the season, there were 6.52 runs per game at Comiskey.

This does not mean the balls weren't doctored, or that they were doctored but it didn't make a difference. It's possible that the special balls were broken out only when the powerful Tigers came to Comiskey (the Tigers played only twice more in Chicago that season, and scored seven runs in the two games).

In 1966, Eddie Stanky replaced Al Lopez as White Sox manager, and Stanky was famous for doing anything to win. In some sources, it's Stanky who gets credited with the ball-doctoring scheme. That's not true, but Stanky does seem to have taken a more active interest than Lopez had.

Roger Bossard, Gene Bossard's son, is currently the head groundskeeper for the White Sox, but in 1967 he was just a kid working for his dad at Comiskey Park. And today, Roger assured me that all of the stories were true.

"Dad had two rooms he kept the baseballs in. One of them was the 'dry room,' which is where he took anybody that asked to see where the baseballs were stored. The other was eight feet by 10 feet, brick-lined. He had a humidifier in there, and you'd go in there and the walls would be dripping with moisture."

And did it make a difference? Roger Bossard certainly thinks so.

"When dad and I would deliver balls to the clubhouse, they would weigh a quarter to a third of an ounce of weight to the ball, and the seams on the ball would be raised, too. Dad did testing when I was there in '67. He'd go to the second deck, and from there he would drop the regular ball down onto the concrete. It would bounce 12 to 14 feet in the air. But when you dropped one of the other balls, it would literally bounce only four or six feet up."

All that said, it's very difficult to find any statistical evidence that the baseballs were any different.

I focused on three periods of time: the roughly three-and-a-half seasons before the aforementioned five-game series against the Tigers ("Before"), the remainder of the 1965 season through the 1968 season ("During"), and the three seasons following following 1968 ("After"); Stanky was fired in 1968 but replaced by Lopez (who managed only a few games in 1969).

         Ratio
Before    46.5
During    47.4
After     53.3

What do those numbers mean? In the "Before" period, only 46.5 percent of the runs scored in White Sox games (by both teams) were scored at Comiskey Park. That's a low figure, but not surprising because Comiskey was the best pitcher's park in the American League. But in the "During" period, a slightly higher percentage of runs were scored in Comiskey than on the road. And the number really jumped in the "After" period, which may have been due to non-doctored baseballs but was more likely due to the White Sox pulling in the fences in 1969.

There's little doubt that the White Sox were doing some strange things to the baseballs, but we'll never know how many of those baseballs were actually put in play, or what effect they actually had on the hitters and pitchers.

On the other hand, at the end of the 2002 season we should be able to reach some fairly precise conclusions about the baseballs the Rockies are using, because the entire process is relatively transparent.

According to a story by Associated Press writer John Marshall, "The room temperature is kept at about 90 degrees to keep condensation from forming on the balls, and the humidity is set at 40 percent to mirror conditions at a Missouri warehouse where the baseballs are stored."

I should mention -- as O'Dowd mentioned to me -- that it was Coors Field engineer Tony Cowell who came up with the idea for the baseball-storage chamber, of which Cowell says, "It's designed to maintain the specifications of the baseball."

And there's been a dramatic difference this season. In their first seven Aprils, the Rockies and their opponents combined to average 15 runs per game at Coors Field. This April, it was just 10 runs per game. And on April 30 and May 1, the Rockies pitched consecutive shutouts for the first time in Coors Field history.

Nobody's claiming victory yet. O'Dowd counsels caution, and Cowell says, "The jury's still out on it. We have to see what happens as we go through time, what happens when we get to the hotter months of the summer."

It's a fascinating experiment, and the Rockies deserve an immense amount of credit for attempting a creative solution for a vexing problem. But Tony Cowell is right. We'll have to see what happens.