A stitch in time: Norwell man makes baseballs the old-fashioned way

MassArt alum William Peebles (BFA, Industrial Design) is the founder, artist and sole employee of the Huntington Base Ball Co., a producer of handmade baseballs, bats, leather wallets, scorebooks and wall art. He’s one of the few − if not the only − small makers of such equipment left in the country, and he does it all out of his Grove Street garage in Norwell, MA.

It takes him, on average, 45 minutes to make a single ball, and that’s after almost 12 years of getting it down to an exact science. Peebles majored in industrial design and worked designing home goods. With the help of a friend at the National Baseball Hall of Fame, he took a chance and launched his company, named for Huntington Avenue in Boston − the street MassArt is on.

Read his story in the Patriot Ledger