Somewhere underneath the cowhide of every baseball thrown in a Major League Baseball game this season is yarn spun in Woonsocket, Rhode Island. The company behind it, The Brickle Group, is a third-generation family textile manufacturer that now processes roughly 30,000 pounds of material into baseball-production yarn, and the firm employs about 150 people at its Rhode Island operations.
The connection between a Rhode Island mill and the ball that lands in a catcher's mitt took years to build. As WCVB reports, The Brickle Group secured its partnership with Rawlings only after a three-year effort. Rawlings is the official supplier of Major League Baseball, and the finished baseballs are assembled and hand-stitched at a Rawlings facility in Costa Rica, meaning the yarn spun in Woonsocket travels well beyond New England before it ever reaches a ballpark.
A Family Business Rooted in Immigration
The company's origin traces back generations before anyone was thinking about baseball cores. Max Brickle said his grandfather immigrated to the United States during the pogroms of the early 1900s, according to the station's report, and that grandfather got his start selling rags on the streets of Woonsocket, buying and selling goods for a nickel and selling for a dime. That hustle eventually grew into what is now The Brickle Group, founded in 1937 by Hyman Brickle as H. Brickle & Son, Inc., a woolen waste dealer trading recycled fibers between textile mills, according to The Brickle Group.
The company has kept expanding its yarn capacity in recent years. In April 2024, The Brickle Group acquired Family Yarns, an Etna, Maine-based textile manufacturer, adding 1 million pounds of woolen spinning capacity to support its industrial and defense yarn operations, per Textile World. In July 2024, the company established its yarn-plying operation at a 474,000-square-foot multi-tenant industrial building in North Smithfield, Rhode Island, pushing its total woolen yarn manufacturing capacity to 2 million pounds annually, the firm's own announcement states.
Beyond the Diamond: Military and Disaster Relief
Baseball yarn is just one slice of what The Brickle Group makes. The company makes military products including berets and blankets, as well as cold-weather gear for the Department of Defense, according to Providence Business News.
That Northwest Woolen Mills division, acquired in 1978, has also made The Brickle Group the nation's largest wool blanket manufacturer, supplying emergency relief blankets to FEMA, the UNHCR, and global disaster relief initiatives, as reported by NRI NOW. In April 2022, the company donated thousands of wool blankets to assist refugees displaced by the war in Ukraine.
Inside the Ball, and the Business Behind It
WCVB reports that Brickle-made yarn is a carefully engineered material inside the baseball, which is assembled and stitched at a Rawlings facility in Costa Rica.
The business arrangement behind that supply chain runs deeper than a standard vendor contract. Major League Baseball acquired a 25 percent ownership stake in Rawlings Sporting Goods in June 2018, partnering with private equity firm Seidler Equity Partners in a $395 million acquisition from Newell Brands, according to SGB Media. Rawlings is MLB's exclusive official supplier of game baseballs, per Ballpark Digest.
That long-term exclusivity has turned into a lucrative prize. Majority owner Seidler Equity Partners has been exploring a sale of its 75 percent stake in Rawlings Sporting Goods at a valuation seeking around $2 billion, including debt, SGB Media reports, a jump from the $395 million price tag the company carried back in 2018. For a Woonsocket operation that started with a man buying rags for a nickel and selling them for a dime, that scale of money now riding on the consistency of its yarn is a long way from the streets where The Brickle Group began.
