How do MLB players get their uniforms clean?

CookingWithGas · May 24, 2014, 1:45am

The first time of the season my son slides, he’s going to have dirt in his pants for the next 3 months. We soak and spray but that ground-in dirt is here to stay. Oh, a lot of it comes out, but those pants will never look white again.

But MLB players show up with absolutely pristine uniforms every game. How do they clean them after getting so dirty? I can’t believe they just throw 'em away after every game.

SmartAlecCat · May 24, 2014, 2:13am

They keep the stains out of baseball

“The process used to be just spraying some kind of a detergent right directly onto the fabric itself and scrubbing the heck out of it and causing it to look like some kind of a fur or something,” said Mitch Poole, clubhouse manager for the Los Angeles Dodgers. “It was very labor intensive, too.”
[…]
“We did it that way for, shoot, 24 years at least,” Poole said.
Then, during a road trip to Phoenix about four years ago, Poole was talking with the clubhouse manager from the Arizona Diamondbacks and discovered the team used a new product, “Slide Out.”
It’s an industrial stain remover specifically made for Major League Baseball by Perry Best and his partner, chemist Mark Simmons. The two men were in the cleaning business and heard how clubs used all different types of pretreatments and other products to get the uniforms clean. So they formed their own company, Brody Chemical, and set out to develop a better cleaning product.
Poole said what they came up with, Slide Out, is to him a miracle product.
“It’s a two-part process” Poole said. “Slide Out one – a real dark purplish-brown liquid that goes on and it permeates into your fabric. And when you do it you think you’re crazy because there is no way this is going to come out because I just made a big mess,” he said.
“Then there’s Slide Out No. 2, which is a clear liquid that when it goes right onto the fabric and the chemical it turns it pretty much white. It takes everything out. It takes all the dirt, all the soil, all the metals that are in there and just pulls it right out.”