Moneyball$$

Big news this week, Onix (who sponsors two of our own, Dave Furman and Dave Smith) announced the purchase of pickleBALL manufacturer Dura. Dura makes the Dura Fast 40, which is the ball used in the higher brackets of many tournaments, and the ball preferred by the Pros. Onix makes the Fuse G2 outdoor ball, the famous and old reliable Pure 2, and the Fuse indoor, used in a few tournaments for the lower brackets. Penn also announced recently that they are jumping into the "competitive" pickleBALL business in the very near future. Currently they only make the Penn 40 ball, which is apparently used by a few recreational players out there, although I haven't met any of them yet. But....they seem to be pretty good at making tennis balls, so my guess is they will come out with a very playable product. And then there's the Franklin X-40 outdoor ball, which kinda falls somewhere in between the Dura Fast 40 and the Fuse G2, and is also used in many competitive tournaments.

Pickleball seems to be the only "racquet" sport that hasn't settled on one approved specification for the thing you hit over a net or against a wall. It seems to me that our Founding Fathers would still prefer to handicap the sport for different player levels by allowing the use of wildly different balls in competitive play. That's OK I guess, but the end result is we (the players) end up paying for it at the register.

I checked Amazon today (might be different tomorrow), and here are the per ball prices.......the Fuse 2 is $3.00, the Franklin X-40 is $2.50, and the Dura Fast 40 is $2.58, if you buy in reasonable quantities.

Need a tennis ball? The Penn Championship Regular Duty is $1.10 and the Wilson Championship Regular Duty is $1.41 in reasonable quantities.

If everyone used the same approved ball, prices would quickly begin to come down as manufacturers began to leverage savings in the manufacturing process, and choice became based on price and reputation only.