San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Every MLB rosin bag comes from San Francisco craftsman’s lair
Major League Baseball has standardized how pitchers use rosin this season, so thousands of rosin bags are being shipped to teams from a single company that obtains, produces and transports the product. If that sounds like a major operation with lots of employees providing tools for the multi-billion-dollar industry that is baseball, well, that’s not the case.
“It’s pretty much me and my dog,” Dave Phillips said.
Phillips does it all by himself — with emotional support from Tater, his 9-yearold Terrier — out of his workplace at a San Francisco pier across the street from Chase Center and a few ground-rule doubles away from Oracle Park.
Raised in Menlo Park and residing in Alameda, Phillips is a lifelong San Francisco Giants fan and got his foot in the MLB door in 2015 when hitters began applying his wax-based adhesive to their
Above: Clumps of rosin, a chalk-like substance that pitchers use for a better grip and to reduce sweat. Top: Bay Area native Dave Phillips refines the substance and ships it to every team in Major League Baseball. bats, starting with former Giants infielders Matt Duffy and Pablo Sandoval.
After last season’s sticky stuff scandal that prompted MLB to discipline players caught with foreign substances, the league has tried to regulate baseballs and what can be applied to them. Humidors now are in all 30 ballparks, and no longer can clubs use different suppliers for rosin, a chalk-like substance that pitchers use mostly for a better grip and also to reduce sweat.
Phillips, 41, has a two-year licensing agreement with MLB. If pitchers are going to use rosin bags, they must come from his shop, Pelican Bat Wax.
“A day after the collective bargaining agreement was reached, they called me and said, ‘How would you like to be the official rosin of Major League Baseball?’ ” Phillips said. “For a small business, a oneman operation in San Francisco, this was a pretty big deal for me.”
With a CBA in place on March 10 and spring training about to begin, Phillips had six days to ship rosin to all 30 clubs, and he pulled it off, but not before celebrating his new deal that weekend by attending a Nick Cave concert in Oakland.
“Then it hit me, oh my God, I was totally overwhelmed, so much to do,” said Phillips, who jotted down team orders on a napkin during his ferry ride to work that Monday morning. “I put my head down and went to work.”
Phillips was prepared. After the sticky-stuff crackdown — prompted because pitchers’ spin rate and velocity soared, stifling offensive numbers — he had read comments from pitchers that something still was needed to grip the ball. So he reached out to Giants clubhouse manager Brad Grems for contacts with folks in MLB’s baseball operations department.
Phillips built a relationship last fall with Joe Martinez, MLB’s senior director of onfield strategy and a former Giants pitcher (2009-2010) who deals with experimental rule and equipment changes. Phillips submitted some of his samples, which were tested by pitchers in Florida and welcomed.
Rather than continuing to allow clubhouse employees to purchase rosin from different companies, MLB wanted more consistency park to park and hired Phillips to be the sole provider.
Thanks to 14-hour-a-day work shifts a few days after the CBA was agreed on, Phillips had shipped 900 rosin bags, 30 to each team. Since then, he has sent each team 80 more rosin bags to cover the first 40 home games. Before every MLB game, two of Phillips’ rosin bags are placed behind the mound by a batboy, one with hard rosin and one with powdery rosin, which Phillips crushes himself with a sledge hammer. Instead of the old style of wrapping rosin in cut-up sanitary socks tied at both ends, the new pouches are hand-made from an Oakland supplier.
Phillips stamps the MLB logo on one side and his company logo on the other, fills it with rosin (while wearing protective gloves and a mask) and seals it with adhesive. It’s placed in zip-lock baggies, tagged and shipped to teams.
Phillips, who still relies on his order form scribbled on the ferry napkin, is working on the next allotment to be used in the season’s second half. Beyond the initial shipments, teams can order additional rosin from his cozy workplace, which has images of Matt Cain and Willie McCovey — even Greg Minton — on his walls, along with a picture of batting helmets belonging to Angel Pagan and his favorite all-time player, Tim Lincecum.
Phillips’ company is named “Pelican” because he grew up surfing in Half Moon Bay, a popular hangout for pelicans, and calls himself a “bird geek.” Plus, he says it has a “nice ring to it.”
If you’re thinking it sounds like a quirky outfit and wondering why MLB didn’t hire a high-end, high-tech lab to supply the rosin bags, remember that for more than 80 years the rubbing mud used on baseballs has come from a tiny company that collects the mud at an undisclosed location on the New Jersey side of the Delaware River.
“Rosin has a lot of different characteristics to it,” Phillips said. “Our rosin works faster. It activates a bit quicker. I think MLB went with what I provide because it gets stickier quicker instead of having to doctor it up.”
Phillips gets his rosin from Honduras pine trees, the national tree of Honduras, where amber-colored sap is extracted in the spring by making cuts in the trees just below the lowest branches. Receptacles are wrapped below the cuts to collect the sap, a process similar to how maple syrup is harvested.
The sap then is boiled to distill out the turpentine, and what’s left is rosin that becomes hard and brittle. It’s packaged in 55-pound clumps and shipped to the East Coast, where it’s repackaged and sent to San Francisco. Phillips orders thousands of pounds at a time.
“Rosin is beautiful when you look at it but not a pleasure to work with,” Phillips said. “It’s a sticky dust. When packing hundreds of rosin bags, your skin turns as tacky as a pitcher’s hand. But it’s all fun.”
This all started as a hobby for Phillips, who in 2009 began playing in hardball leagues including the Bay Area Vintage Base Ball league, which reproduces the 1880s game including its uniforms, equipment and rules.
Phillips had a screen-printing company called Pelican Print Shop and in 2013 pivoted to Pelican Bat Wax and started devising a variety of products including bat grip he used in his league and shared with teammates.
“I made the stuff in my apartment in the Mission,” Phillips said. “I sold, like, two bars in a year.”
When he got a write-up in a baseball blog a few years later, he got more business and eventually became a full-time supplier. One of his products is
Pelican Grip Dip, which was designed to use on bats, but big-league pitchers got a hold of it and used it as a grip enhancer that ultimately got banned, along with Spider Tack, as part of MLB’s crackdown last summer.
Phillips would prefer to disassociate himself from that hullabaloo. Nowadays, it’s not uncommon for his handful of products, including pine tar stick (or pine tar pops), to be seen in dugouts or on-deck circles.
Phillips recalls Duffy as the first major-leaguer to use his product and introduce it to other players, and the Red Sox as the first team to make an order, thanks to a push by their third baseman at the time, Sandoval. It made Phillips realize it wasn’t just a hobby but a potential livelihood.
“It’s all natural. It’s vegan, no animal-based products,” Phillips said of his products. “Very San Francisco.”