My response to you is nearly identical to what I told a sibling commenter. Some of those things are right and some of them are wrong, but far more importantly I

My response to you is nearly identical to what I told a sibling commenter. Some of those things are right and some of them are wrong, but far more importantly I really like your thought process. I don't want to give "real" answer/answers, in case anybody else is having fun speculating! But I will also say that the "real" answer/answers are somewhat debatable. In the sense of: the players utilize the properties of the felt in particular ways. So, are the balls fuzzy because the players utilize those properties, or do the players utilize those properties because the balls are fuzzy? (Which came first, the chicken or the egg?) The answer itself is fuzzy, because the reality is that the ball and the players and the game have evolved steadily over ~100 years.