Are the baseballs in the Olympics pre-tacked?

Yahoo Sports reporter Hannah Keyser gives you a behind the scenes glimpse at the baseballs being used in the Olympic Games in Tokyo, balls that USA pitcher Joe Ryan says are the best balls he’s ever used.

Video Transcript

HANNNAH KEYSER: I'm Hannah Keyser. I am coming to you from a very tiny hotel room in Tokyo where I'm covering the Olympics, and I wanted to show you something. So baseball is back at the Olympics after 13 years away. And we wanted to talk about the baseball, not the baseball.

So these are the exact baseballs that they are using in the Olympic games, at least for the Olympic qualifiers as well. They're made by SSK, the Japanese corporation, although they're not the same one that makes the actual NPB-- Japanese Baseball League baseballs. And why do I have them?

Well, so, this pitcher Joe Ryan on Team USA-- he pitches for the Twins, the Twins organization-- talked about how much he loves the baseballs that they're using here. And one of the reasons he loves them is that they have a additional grip, that they're easier to grip without sticky stuff. So you don't need to put anything on them, no sunscreen and rosin, no pine tar, no spider tack, to get a good grip.

This would be great for MLB if they could have a baseball like that because it would allow them to sort of police the illegal use of sticky stuff without potentially endangering their batters because pitchers are throwing 100 miles an hour and they need to be able to control them. So I want to show you something in particular. So this is two baseballs. The difference is this one has been rubbed up with mud for game use, like all balls are both here and in America, and this one is not. This is straight out of the packaging. You can see how nice and clean it is.

It comes in this plastic packaging, and I took it off already. I'm going to try to keep this one clean so we're going to put it by the side. And I want to show you something with this. So I have no sticky stuff on my hands, no spider tack, no pine tar, no sunscreen and rosin even. And the question is, can you-- if you're a pitcher, so you're working with the baseball-- get a grip? You hear that? So, OK.

You can sort of-- don't move that. Don't look at my nails. You can hear that without any sort of additional sticky stuff, the baseballs that they're using here at the Olympics-- are pretty clearly pre tacked. That was a matter of consternation. Pretty clearly have something on them that gives pitchers a grip, and it's not super-obvious. It's not super-intrusive. If you're watching the games, you probably haven't even thought about that or noticed. And why does that matter?

Well, because MLB says it's impossible to make a sort of suitable pre-tacked baseball. And obviously, there's just two of them. This is a very small sample size. I'm sure that over a full season of Major League Baseball, you'd find tons of things wrong with a pre-tacked baseball as well. But I don't know, it's a starting point.