Hmm. That was a good one. I found that if you load the file, delete the collision physics on both balls, free all bakes, then reinstate the collision physics on each ball and bake all dynamics, it works! I guess maybe there is a cache that is lingering around. I didn’t try using a cache path other than lib. That might help.
The other thing I found was that if you just load the file, scale one of balls very slightly, then bake, it works! Again, this probably invalidated some existing cache or something.
Bakes and freeing them often trip me up, and I still want to understand them better.
Just a thought - when you prepared the blend file for posting, did you simple Save it, or did you do External Data? If the latter, perhaps that is what posted the offending beginning cache??