Easton Hoping to Bat Cleanup : Sports: The firm dominates the field in aluminum bats and archery equipment. Now it’s aiming at baseball gloves and hockey sticks.

Major league baseball opens a new season next week, bringing back the sound that delights millions--the “thwack” of a wood bat hitting a ball. But at thousands of high school, college and community ballparks, the hitting sound is the “boink” of aluminum bats.

Little League and colleges like aluminum bats because they don’t break as often as wood and save money. And nearly all of the aluminum bats used in the United States are made by a Van Nuys-based company, Jas. D. Easton Inc.

Its chairman, James L. Easton, is constantly asked if he minds that the big leagues eschew his bats in favor of the traditional wood. “I don’t really care,” said Easton, 55, adding that he doesn’t think that the pros will ever switch to aluminum. “The amateur market is where they’re sold, and it’s an outstanding bat for the market because amateurs can never get the good wood anyway.”

It’s also a good market for Easton and its 1,000 employees. Easton, though not as famous as its larger rivals Rawlings, Wilson or Spalding, nonetheless has no peer in the U. S. markets for aluminum bats and archery equipment. The company figures that it has 80% or more of both markets, and its annual sales overall exceed $100 million and are growing 15% to 20% a year. Because the company is privately owned by his family, James Easton declined to be more specific.

Aluminum bats and archery equipment account for about 70% of Easton’s sales; the company churns out 50,000 arrows and 6,000 bats a day from its factories in Van Nuys, San Diego and Salt Lake City.

Easton is also moving hockey into the aluminum age, in no small part thanks to its signing of Los Angeles Kings superstar Wayne Gretzky to use and endorse its aluminum sticks. Now aluminum hockey sticks and related equipment are 15% to 20% of Easton’s sales and the remaining amount stems from Easton’s sales of baseball gloves, baseball hitting gloves, football pads and gloves, golf-club shafts made from an aluminum-carbon hybrid, ski poles and tubular framing for bicycles and outdoor equipment.

But despite its growth, Easton has only 1% of the $10-billion worldwide sporting goods industry, and it faces a gang of rivals--including Japanese companies such as Mizuno--in the other markets where it competes.

Because the big three U. S. sporting goods makers are owned by larger parents, none will disclose their annual sales. (Figgie International, a Willoughby, Ohio-based conglomerate, owns Rawlings; Wilson is a unit of Amer Group Ltd. of Finland, and Spalding is part of Spalding & Evenflo Cos. controlled by the Cisneros family of Venezuela.) But industry sources say Wilson is the biggest, with about $650 million in sales, followed by Spalding at $500 million. Figgie will say only that Rawlings is bigger than Easton’s $100 million in sales but smaller than Wilson.

Given the glut of competitors, for Easton to keep growing, it must take market share from its rivals because overall U. S. sporting goods sales are growing only modestly. The Sporting Goods Manufacturers Assn., a trade group, predicts that manufacturers’ sales this year will rise about 6%, which is very little real growth after subtracting inflation.

So Easton stepped up its attack this year by quadrupling its advertising budget, to about $2 million, to run ads in Sports Illustrated. One ad shows Gretzky and Easton’s hockey stick; another touts the fact that San Francisco Giants slugger Will Clark uses its Easton baseball gloves.

Thus far, baseball gloves make up a tiny portion of Easton’s sales. Today’s gloves are larger and better made than was the case decades ago, and Easton sells gloves in most price ranges--from $30 to $130. But Easton still views gloves as a crowded commodity business where inexpensive prices, thin profit margins and high volume are the norm. (Nearly all baseball gloves sold in the United States are made overseas.)

Gloves “are more or less accessories” to its aluminum bat line, James Easton said.

So why spend big bucks advertising them? “What we’re really selling in that ad is Easton rather than a glove,” he said. “We don’t have any pros playing with our aluminum bats, so we pay a guy like Will Clark not because we’re going to sell a ton of gloves, but because he gives us exposure in baseball.”

Easton declined to say what Clark is paid. But one industry source said a typical contract would call for Clark to earn $100,000 a year plus royalties from sales of the Clark-endorsed gloves.

The exposure is being noticed. “They are becoming more visible and more promotion-oriented,” Spalding spokesman Greg Sherry said. But because Easton is not a “full-line” sporting goods company, “Easton is not one of the four or five companies we watch closely,” he said.

In hockey, however, Easton is being watched closely. The company wants to dominate the National Hockey League with its aluminum sticks, and that effort got a major boost this year when Easton signed Gretzky to endorse its sticks over the next seven years. The endorsement pays Gretzky more than $1 million, James Easton said, but he declined to elaborate.

Easton said that 75 to 80 NHL players use his aluminum sticks--out of roughly 420 league players overall--and that “we’ll see over 50% using our sticks in four or five years.” That’s bad news for Figgie International, which claims that its Sherwood and Chimo brands of hockey sticks are used by more pro hockey players than all other brands combined.

No surprise then that Easton executives were ecstatic recently when cover photos on Sports Illustrated magazine and The National sports newspaper both showed St. Louis Blues star Brett Hull, complete with his Easton stick squarely in the pictures.

But Easton has also had its share of strikeouts. The company is struggling to get major golf equipment manufacturers to use its aluminum/carbon shafts.

“It’s a tough industry to break into,” James Easton said. “Some people have told us they don’t want to buy from us because we’re the only source that makes this thing.”

Easton’s bid to crack the Japanese market also hasn’t been easy. The company has sold aluminum bats to baseball-crazy Japan since 1987, but Easton admitted that so far “we’re selling them peanuts. It’s like beating your head against a wall.”

It didn’t help when two Japanese high school ballplayers had Easton bats break in their hands last year. “They got damaged internally here in the manufacturing process and it was our mistake,” James Easton said. Japanese authorities ordered an immediate recall of 15,000 of those model bats, sullying Easton’s image and prompting James Easton to grumble that he doubted whether a Japanese manufacturer would have been forced to make a similar recall.

Nonetheless, Easton still counts Japan, Canada and Europe among its best foreign markets. Foreign sales account for 15% of Easton’s total sales and that figure could climb to 30% as baseball and football gain wider audiences overseas, James Easton said.

Easton was a familiar name in archery long before it got into baseball. Easton’s father, James D. (Doug) Easton, started the company by accident. After injuring his legs when he dropped a shotgun and it went off, the elder Easton read an archery book while he recovered, and later began making his own bows and arrows.

He started his company in 1922 and began making aluminum arrows in 1939. The senior Easton died in 1972, two years after the company started making aluminum baseball bats, and the younger Easton took the helm.

As Easton’s company grows, the question of who will eventually succeed him looms larger. He has no plans to take the company public and prefers that his son Greg, a 27-year-old product manager in Easton’s baseball-glove unit, eventually take the reins.

“It’s too early to say whether he’s willing to make that commitment,” James Easton said. “But I prefer to give my son the opportunity. I had an opportunity from my dad, and I’d like to give him that same one.”