The Slugger : From Ty Cobb to Modern Little Leaguers, This Company Has Put Bats in Their Hands

The baseball bat is a factor in the explosion of home runs in the major leagues this year, maintains John A. Hillerich III.

“Of course there’s a lot more involved than the bat, but the bat definitely has something to do with it,” Hillerich said.

He ought to know. His grandfather made the first Louisville Slugger in 1884.

Hillerich, 46, is president of Hillerich & Bradsby Co., the oldest and largest baseball bat firm in the world, the company that for 103 years has made Louisville Sluggers, the overwhelming favorite of major and minor leaguers.

“Today’s bats are designed for ballplayers to hit home runs,” Hillerich said. “The wood is the same as always. It’s a 100% natural product. God grows the trees. But in the last five years baseball bats have become lighter, with thinner handles and smaller barrels.”

Hillerich is convinced that the new bats help players hit more home runs, that the lighter bats go through the strike zone quicker and drive the ball farther.

But he also believes that the main reason for the increased number of homers is “the super athletes out there on the playing field. These guys are well trained, well coordinated. Look at the arms on those players. Look at their size. There aren’t many Pee Wee Reeses out there.”

Hillerich tells of recently standing next to Dave Parker in the Cincinnati dugout. “Awesome!” he said. “There are a lot of big, strong guys like that playing today.”

It was His grandfather, John Andrew (Bud) Hillerich, who made the first Louisville Slugger when he was 17 for Pete Browning, who played for the Louisville Eclipse baseball team. Bud Hillerich worked in his father’s woodworking shop in Louisville, turning out bed posts, porch columns, handrails, tenpins and wooden bowling balls.

Browning, known as the old gladiator, was in a batting slump in the summer of 1884. Hillerich handcrafted a bat and presented it to Browning, who had three hits with it in the first game he used it.

Other Eclipse players had Hillerich make bats for them, and an industry was born. The rest is history.

Louisville Sluggers were made in Louisville until 1974, when the big bat company outgrew its 75-year-old plant. Since then the bats have been produced in Slugger Park, a 56-acre facility across the Ohio River from Louisville here in Jeffersonville. Corporate headquarters of Hillerich & Bradsby remain in downtown Louisville.

John Hillerich says that whenever he goes to a ballpark, the first thing players do is grab a bat and start explaining something about it. “Here they are, some of these guys making a million-plus, and they value that little piece of wood very much,” he said. “It’s their livelihood. They care about what they’re swinging. They know what they want.”

Some of them, for instance, use dark-barreled bats in night games because they believe it’s more difficult for fielders to see where the ball is going if hit by a black bat after dark.

The Louisville Slugger trademark and the player’s name are branded on the flat of the bat’s grain. Players hit the ball on the strongest part of the bat, opposite the brand. Yogi Berra, though, kept hitting the ball on the trademark and kept breaking bats.

“We told Yogi to hold the trademark so you could read it,” recalled Bill Williams, 45, Hillerich & Bradsby vice president. He says Yogi retorted: “I come up to the plate to hit, not to read.”

So, all of Yogi’s bats were branded on the wrong side and he stopped breaking them.

The white ash for Louisville Sluggers comes from the company’s 5,000 acres of timber in Pennsylvania and New York. Every year about 20,000 trees are harvested to make 1,250,000 bats. About 150,000 of them go to professional ballplayers in the major and minor leagues.

Each bat for a professional ballplayer is hand-turned on lathes in the same manner as when Louisville Sluggers were first made in the late 1800s. It takes 15 to 20 minutes for a master woodmaker to hand-turn a bat to an individual player’s specifications. It takes eight seconds on an automatic lathe to produce a bat sold for other than major or minor league play.

The company loses money on the 150,000 bats made for professional players because of the time involved in the hand-crafting of each bat. “We look upon it as a service we provide pro baseball. Without pro baseball we wouldn’t be here,” said Williams.

Hillerich & Bradsby’s subsidiary, Larimer & Norton Co., operates seven mills in New York and Pennsylvania, where 60-foot, 75-year-old white ash trees--perfect for baseball bats--are reduced to billets--blanks--that are shipped by rail to Jeffersonville to be lathed, tapered, branded and lacquered into bats.

In 1905, Honus Wagner, the Flying Dutchman, signed a contract, giving the company permission to use his autograph on the Louisville Slugger. It was one of the first endorsements by an athlete of a product. Ty Cobb signed up in 1908.

Now, 70% of the major leaguers and 90% of minor leaguers have similar contracts with Hillerich & Bradsby.

Chuck Schupp, 33, director of bat sales to professional players, is the company’s contact with players and club equipment managers. There are more than 600 players in the big leagues, and he knows nearly every one of them on a first-name basis. Schupp visits each club at least twice a year and talks to ballplayers every day on the phone.

“They call me to tell me when a bat is uncomfortable or doesn’t seem quite right for them,” Schupp said. “The weight may not be right, or the handle or the barrel. We adjust their bat design to whatever they feel their needs are.”

Some players use a different weight or style bat depending on who’s pitching. Vince Coleman of the St. Louis Cardinals, a switch-hitter, uses different models depending on whether he is batting left- or right-handed. Late in the season, some players don’t feel as strong as they did in April and drop down an ounce or two in weight. The average bat weighs 32 ounces.

“Players do a lot of talking among themselves about their bats,” Schupp said. “There are many mental aspects to hitting. Some switch bats when in a slump. Others use the same bat no matter whether they’re hitting well or not. The average player goes through six dozen bats in a season. The club buys the bats.”

Eddie Murray of Baltimore comes to the plant to pick out his own billets to be made into his bats. When Ted Williams was playing, he did the same.

Some players oil their bats. Others rub them with secret unguents or tobacco juice. Frankie Frisch hung his Sluggers in a barn during the off-season to “cure” them.

The big bat factory here is a popular tourist stop. Every year more than 50,000 men, women and children take tours of the plant. They see bats made, see the order blanks sent in from their favorite ballplayers hanging on hooks in the shop. They visit the Baseball Bat Museum.

In the museum is one of the bats Babe Ruth used in 1927, the year he hit 60 homers. It has 21 notches, one for each home run he hit with it.

There also are bats used by Hank Aaron, John McGraw, Ty Cobb, Lou Gehrig, Walter Johnson, Jimmie Foxx, Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Johnny Bench and George Brett, among others.

In 1975, Hillerich & Bradsby sold six million wooden baseball bats, more than any other year in history. Since then, the aluminum bat has come upon the baseball scene. The major leagues studied the idea of switching to aluminum bats but decided against it and aluminum bats are not used in professional baseball.

College teams using aluminum bats have batting averages as high as .370 and more, though, and individual players have batted as high as .500. Professional softball teams have had as many as 90 runs in a game. Now, there’s a group of college coaches trying to outlaw the aluminum bat in college play.

Hillerich & Bradsby, though, is also one of the biggest producers of aluminum bats. The company’s aluminum bat plant in Santa Fe Springs, Calif., manufactures 600,000 bats a year.

If the firm’s fame is in bats, though, its fortune is in golf clubs, which H & B has been making since 1916. The biggest money maker is the PowerBiltline. Aluminum bats rank second in the company’s annual sales, wooden bats third. The company also sells 250,000 baseball gloves and mitts a year, 500,000 hockey sticks, and also makes croquet sets, pool tables and other items.

At one time, there were 65 companies manufacturing wooden baseball bats in the United States. Now, there are about 10, with Adirondack, Worth and Mizuno of Japan, the Louisville Slugger’s biggest competitors.

“Neither wood nor aluminum bat manufacturers are a threat to us,” said Williams. “We have the best white ash timberland on earth for baseball bats. Other companies buy their white ash from us. We have been a leader in aluminum bats ever since they’ve been on the market.”