Dave Phillips’ journey from a San Francisco screenprinter to the exclusive producer of rosin bags for Major League Baseball started with a love of pelicans.
It was 2013 and Phillips was printing up t-shirts of old minor league teams that didn’t exist and selling them to die hard baseball fans when Ebbets Field Flannels approached him.
“They said, ‘we have the licensing for all these teams so you can’t do that,’” said Phillips, 44. “I was like, OK, screw it. I’ll make shirts of fake teams that never existed so I could keep the designs I had.”
One of those designs was of an imaginary team called the San Francisco Pelicans.
Well, he thought it was an imaginary team.
But when he posted a picture of his design online, he got approached by a group of middle-aged guys playing baseball in 1800s uniforms.
Their name? The San Francisco Pelicans.
They told Phillips they play in the Bay Area Vintage Baseball League and they loved his design. They invited him to a pickup game.
Vintage baseball is a bizarre thing to see at first glance. The players use tiny gardener’s gloves, akin to the ones used during baseball games in 1886. The umpire is dressed in a tuxedo and smokes cigars. Players swig from beer cans and shout old-timey sayings at one another. And some of the rules wouldn’t make any sense to a modern fan.
But to Phillips, it was perfect.
“I thought it was a really fresh change because it was competitive but everyone was so friendly with each other,” he said.
Phillips joined the Berkeley team, and soon he was channeling his obsession with printing t-shirts to an obsession with baseball accessories.
“I wanted to come up with a product that I could screenprint the design for,” he said.
His product of choice: sticky stuff. There’s plenty of it in baseball, as pitchers and hitters alike search for ways to grip the ball, especially in particularly cold or humid conditions.
He made pine tar sticks to rub all over the bat in the on-deck circle and help prevent it from flying out of hitters’ hands. His GripDip was used to put in a pitchers’ glove and offer a sticky substance to improve pitchers’ handle on the ball. His rosin bags were placed behind the pitcher’s mound to offer an alternative in aiding the grip.
“The vintage baseball guys got a kick out of it,” he said. “I started taking it everywhere I went. I became obsessed with it. I’m like, ‘this is something I should keep doing.’”
Two years into his experimentation, Phillips sent some of his items to every MLB team. The product still wasn’t very good, he said, but a few players liked the aesthetic and requested more samples.
One of them was former San Francisco Giants’ slugger Pablo Sandoval.
Sandoval moved to the Boston Red Sox in 2015 and shared the substances with his teammates. Many of them liked it, and Phillips sent more.
Soon, multiple big league teams were calling him and Phillips ramped up his production.
Then, in 2021, MLB made a historic decision. While there had long been rules against using sticky substances, the league had rarely enforced those rules, instead allowing players to establish a baseline for what they think is acceptable and enforce the rules themselves. But MLB wanted to change that.
Suddenly, umpires were ejecting players on a nightly basis. Pitchers were randomly checked throughout a game, and if there was any sticky residue on their fingers, they were thrown out and subject to fines and suspensions.
One of the substances in question: GripDip, Phillips’ homemade product.
He got an idea. He called Giants clubhouse manager Brad Grems and suggested MLB standardize a product that every team could use.
At the time, each team’s clubhouse attendant was often responsible for grinding up rosin in a blender and throwing it in a sock. But Grems connected Phillips to an MLB executive, and the two sides started talking about a standardized rosin bag.
Rosin bags are made from a sap that’s pulled from pine trees in Honduras, then boiled to distill out the turpentine. What remains is a hard rosin that Phillips crushes and pours into bags.
WIth the help from player feedback after nearly a year of testing, the league was ready to form a partnership.
In the spring of 2022, a day after MLB negotiated a new collecting bargaining agreement with the MLB Players’ Association, Phillips got a phone call.
“How would you like to be the official manufacturer of the rosin bags for MLB?” he was asked.
He quit his part-time bartending job and began producing rosin bags full-time. With the help of a friend who helps stamp the bags with the official MLB logo, Phillips is producing hundreds of bags per day, with 5,000 of them due by the middle of March.
Dozens of times each game, a big league pitcher will step off the mound between pitches, bend over and pick up one of Phillips’ rosin bags, give it a good whack to release some of the rosin and rub the ball to improve the grip.
On one side of the bag is the MLB logo. On the other side it says, “Handmade by Pelican Bat Wax.”
Back home in the Bay Area, Phillips can be found at his Emeryville workshop most days, but on the weekends, he puts on his vintage baseball uniform and hits the field with his teammates on the Berkeley Clarions.
Last season, with Phillips as their captain, they went undefeated, a historic feat since the 20-year-old league expanded to 10 teams across the Bay Area.
The Clarions came close to losing once, last May, when they were down nine runs in the bottom of the last inning. They stormed back to stun their opponents in a victory Phillips will never forget.
The opponent? The San Francisco Pelicans.
Similar to making rosin bags, putting together a baseball team is a “chemical equation,” Phillips said. “You don’t have to be the best team, but if everyone has the right mentality, plays well together and nobody feels pressure, they can do something special.”
