Ronald Hickland Jr.’s hardness tests show why USBC needs to put EARL to work doing systemic, scientific hardness testing

I’ve been preaching since bowling ball hardness became a thing again in recent years that USBC needs to do systemic, scientific testing with its EARL robot that can quantify exactly what various values of hardness mean in ball motion. The sport is working off a standard developed about 50 years ago based on polyester balls. The saga of the 6s and 7s PURPLE HAMMERs that led to their banning almost certainly tells us why USBC preferred to just tweak the rule and pretend the urethane proble...