Balata ball

The balata ball was a type of baseball used during the 1943 major league season due to material shortages caused by World War II.

The material most impacted by the shortages was rubber, used to make the ball's core, but now in short supply due to Japan's invasion of Malaysia, the largest producer of rubber at the time. To counter this, the ball's center was made of a mixture of cork and balata, a type of latex extracted from the Manilkara bidentata tree native to Latin America and also called balatá. However, contrary to rubber, this form of latex is inelastic, and the resulting baseball was much less dynamic than the previous rubber-based ones, leading to falling offensive numbers, which were already down before the switch of materials, due to a large number of players being drafted or volunteering for military service.