Last night I gave the thumb hole a very thorough cleaning and hit it lightly with a Scotch Brite pad. I didn't expect it to do too much but that is all I had on hand. There was a minimal improvement but today I knew I would have access to the dry wall screening if the Scotch Brite was not enough.
Headed out to my new PSO first thing this morning to take my old ball to get it plugged and re-drilled and also pickup a plastic spare ball just to see if I thought it would help on the 10 pin and 6/10 pin leaves (it does). Played 6 games with my strike ball and in game 2 the thumb stick issue started to surface. Nothing horrible just enough for it to throw off the shots a little. I resisted the urge to go to the baby powder and instead wiped out he hole with my towel, wiped off my thumb a little and used the air blower on the end of the ball return area to try to get my thumb as dry as possible. It didn't completely alleviate the issue but seemed to help at least somewhat. How I worked through it was to throw the ball a little harder and concentrate on trying to relax my hand. This seemed to help a little more but I am still not 100% there.
The spare ball I had zero issues with my thumb sticking but I didn't throw it nearly as much and it is brand new. It is also 1 Lbs. lighter as I wanted to know what a 14#'er feels like. I am fine with it.
So when I got home I stopped to get some of the dry wall screening and gave the strike ball thumb hole a quick hit with that. Playing again in the morning when I meet up with pops for our weekly game. Hopefully no issues tomorrow morning but I won't be convinced until I can get through 2 weeks of league night without issue. That will also be the hardest time to resist using the baby powder as more is on the line than just a practice session. I am just going to have to suck it up if I start having an issue and live through it.
Funny, to me, thing about my new spare ball is the coloring. The choices were mostly light colors which I wasn't very keen on. There was one that was black and orange that I thought wasn't too bad. I really don't care too much about the color but with a bunch to choose from that was definitely the color scheme I preferred when viewing the other options. The new PSO said 'that is the one you want?' to which I responded 'Yep, that's definitely the one', he said 'Uh, Ok then'. 15 minutes later he comes out with a purple and black ball. It caught me a bit off guard and I was wondering 'what the heck' but as he got closer I realized the other side of the ball is purple and black. On the display shelf all I could see was orange and black and didn't realize the other side was sparkly purple and black. Doh, I'm gonna take some ribbing for that. It's ugly but no worries. It's a bit comical.
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