Designer Connects With His High-Tech Softball Bat : Entrepreneur: Ray DeMarini finds a growing market for his innovative aluminum slugger, which features an enlarged sweet spot. Customers pay up to $299.95 for a custom model.
Ray DeMarini says he’s happy being a little guy because he carries a big bat, an aluminum slugger he designed from scratch and turned into a major business.
The 5-foot-6, 48-year-old DeMarini sells softball bats that have become popular among heavy hitters who often top 250 pounds and among smaller players who just want the thrill of finding the sweet spot that will send the ball over the fence.
The high-technology, double-wall bat design has pushed DeMarini Sports Inc. to No. 24 on the list of the 100 fastest-growing companies in Oregon, and he’s aiming for No. 1.
DeMarini sold 7,500 bats for $980,000 last year and expects to sell 12,000 bats worth $2.5 million this year. His customers are so competitive and so serious about the game, he says, that they will gladly pay the $124.95 to $299.95 price for a DeMarini custom aluminum bat.
“If you and I are equal, and I have better equipment, I win every time,” DeMarini said. “Now think about the fact that there are 40 million softball players in this country, and you don’t have to be a mathematical genius to figure out this can be a big business.”
It has been a big business for a long time at Hillerich & Bradsby Co. of Louisville, Ky., makers of the famed “Louisville Slugger,” and Easton Sports Inc., based in Van Nuys.
The two privately held companies dominate the baseball and softball bat market, but smaller private manufacturers such as DeMarini are trying to carve out a niche for themselves in an estimated $100-million industry.
Bill Williams, spokesman for Hillerich & Bradsby, has seen the industry switch almost entirely from wood bats to aluminum bats in the past 20 years.
The Kentucky company made 6 million wood bats annually 20 years ago, now down to a projected 1 million this year, mostly for professional baseball, which bans metal bats.
But H&B;, as it’s known in the trade, will make 1.5 million aluminum bats this year, compared to just 50,000 a year in the mid-1970s.
“The last vestige of amateur baseball to legalize aluminum was the NCAA in 1974,” Williams said. “After that it was a done deal. But softball kind of led the way.”
DeMarini was one of those leaders, playing and coaching softball as long as he can remember, turning his genuine love of the game into a regular fixture on ESPN called “The Ultimate Softball Show.”
He was spotted in June, 1987, by an ESPN producer, Erich Lytle, who marveled that a small player such as DeMarini could hit the ball so well. The pair teamed up for an unscripted video that won the American Film Institute award for Instructional Sports Video of the Year.
In the summer of 1990, DeMarini was working as a manager at Freightliner Corp., a Portland, Ore., heavy-truck subsidiary of Mercedes-Benz, when he found himself staring out his office window at the high arches of the downtown Fremont Bridge over the Willamette River.
He was struck by the notion that the technology used to build bridges could be translated to a softball bat, and he found an engineer on the Freightliner staff, Mike Eggiman, who took his notion very seriously.
“He literally made a Montgomery Ward washing machine into a bat machine,” DeMarini said of the man who eventually became his partner. “If you saw the way we did this at first, you’d have thought we were a couple of nut cases.”
The two have since left Freightliner and refined their bat-making technology into a high-tech system they are expanding to a new 20,000-square-foot plant in suburban Hillsboro, Ore.
DeMarini says the secret of his bat’s success is extending the sweet spot from less than one inch to five inches, giving power hitters plenty of room for error if they miss dead center on the bat when they’re swinging with all their might.
He had to fight the two main softball organizations in order to win acceptance of the design, including a lawsuit, which he claims pushed the Amateur Softball Assn. of America and the U.S. Slo-Pitch Softball Assn. into adopting performance standards for bats.
“I think you can say Ray played a role, but his role was not greater than any other manufacturer,” said Ron Babb, spokesman for the Amateur Softball Assn. in Oklahoma City.
Babb said his group is more concerned about increasing the skill level of softball players and coaches, and enhancing their performance, than about improving equipment performance.
The association recently banned titanium softball bats made by H&B; and by Easton because of complaints that batters were routinely belting home runs and safety concerns about higher-speed hits hurtling at infielders.
Jim Darby, spokesman for Easton at its Burlingame, Calif., marketing division, said that the company has always been concerned about safety and fairness and that the softball association overreacted.
He predicted that innovators such as his company and DeMarini’s may be bucking up against a high-tech wall now that the softball organizations are setting limits.
“How much can you do with a bat?” Darby said.
DeMarini is convinced that the market has plenty of growth left, especially among dedicated players.
“If you have anything that can remotely help them hit that ball better or farther, they’ll buy it,” he said. “It’s ego. And that’s the way I am. I know these guys. I’m the same way. I want to hit it over the fence every time.”
