Why are tennis balls fuzzy?

    Dreams have been odd lately, as usual, but you're lucky that I don't remember much about them. In fact I've been sleeping really well lately. The big sleep issue was night before last when I woke up with pins and needles in my arm ('cause it's silly to say my arm was asleep when my whole body was asleep) and it took ages to get it to abate. I think I hit a nerve, something not unlike the funny bone, except not funny. But I got back to sleep no problem, which is a nice change.
    The tennis ball dream featured a gas station except that once you got inside the convenience store part it was more like the checkout area of a Walmart in that there were untold numbers of kiosks each with a checker and a cash register. And above the cash register at each kiosk there was a locker, or maybe more like an overhead compartment on an airplane. And nobody was bothered that I went and checked them all out. And inside all of them were giant fuzzy tennis balls. But what bothered me, and continued to when I woke up, was why are tennis balls fuzzy? Were they always fuzzy? When the kings and queens of France played jeu de paumes, did they play with fuzzy balls, and if so where did they get them? Did they knit them from fleece?
    I could look it up of course, but I'm much more enjoying being bewildered by it, and prefer to leave it as a rhetorical question. That and the related one: why aren't all balls fuzzy? If you can serve a fuzzy tennis ball 130 miles per hour, maybe fuzzy is best. Or the other related question: how fast would serves go if tennis balls WEREN'T fuzzy? Makes ya wonder, don't it?