Officials hope Louisville Slugger is a hit at home : Changing market conditions have brought the company that makes the famed baseball bats back to the city where it all began.

Throughout my baseball career, I have always depended on Louisville Slugger bats for the driving power and punch that brings home runs.

--Babe Ruth, 1931

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The words Louisville and Slugger go together like Babe and Ruth. To break up the union after 112 years would be like Churchill Downs running the Kentucky Derby in Tennessee or Hershey Foods Corp. closing down its chocolate factory in Hershey, Pa., and setting up shop in Philadelphia.

But much to the chagrin of Louisville, that’s exactly what happened in 1974 when Hillerich & Bradsby Co. pulled its wood-working plant out of downtown and started making America’s most famous baseball bat across the Ohio River, in an industrial section of Jefferson, Ind., known as Cementville. “It was a civic embarrassment,” sniffed Laurel Shackelford, an editorial writer for the Louisville Courier-Journal.

Although its corporate headquarters remained here, H & B, as the venerable family-owned company is known locally, left because its Louisville neighborhood was deteriorating, its century-old plant was antiquated and, with the sale of its wooden bats topping 7 million a year, it needed more manufacturing space. But Cementville Slugger? No way.

The Louisville Slugger was part of baseball’s heritage. Ted Williams once clambered over stacks of uncut white ash here to choose the wood his bats would be made from. Joe Sewell used the same Louisville Slugger for 14 years and proudly told an H & B executive at the end of his career, “Well, you didn’t make any money off me.” Honus Wagner, Stan Musial, Hank Aaron--they all swung Louisville Sluggers, and so did millions of American boys who dreamed of being Wagner, Musial and Aaron.

Thankfully, this story doesn’t end in Cementville. Last January, Louisville and the Slugger were reunited when H & B came back home, moving its manufacturing plant into a renovated, 160-year-old tobacco warehouse that has become the crowning symbol of the city’s downtown economic revival. Outside the plant on 8th and Main--and the adjoining museum that will open in July--now rises a 130-foot-high, 34-ton steel replica of the model R43 Louisville Slugger that Ruth swung.

“Five years ago this part of Main Street was a pit,” said Mike Bosc of the Greater Louisville Economic Development Partnership. “Now it’s being revived. Having Louisville Slugger back is a great asset, and when the museum opens, it will be a major attraction.”

Ironically, what brought H & B home was the fact that sales of wooden baseball bats are plummeting--H & B doesn’t even make money on them anymore--and the company needed a smaller manufacturing plant. The reason: Hollow-tubed aluminum bats, which hit the ball farther, don’t break and thus save a team money, are used exclusively at every level from Little League through college. They have turned wooden bats into a quaint relic favored only by major- and minor-league professionals.

“The wood bat might come back, but we really don’t know what’s going to happen to it,” said H & B President John Hillerich III, whose grandfather made the first Louisville Slugger in 1884 (although it was called a Falls City Slugger after Louisville’s nickname). “Right now, as long as the company is profitable, the wood bat business is sustainable for us. To be out of it would be like throwing away our heritage.”

While business is booming at H & B’s aluminum bat plant in Ontario, Calif., the sale of its wood bats made in Louisville has dropped to about 1 million a year, a fifth of which goes to the pros. A wood bat typically retails for about $25, an aluminum one for $100 to $150. H & B also developed a $500 titanium bat, but balls traveled such an awesome distance off it, the company discontinued the model.

At its factory here, H & B has more than 8,000 major league signatures that have graced Louisville Sluggers over the decades. It can reproduce models to the precise specifications of particular major leaguers--Al Simmons, who played for Boston and Philadelphia, used the longest bat H & B made, 38 inches; Willie Keeler of the New York Yankees the shortest, 30-plus inches.

H & B paid Babe Ruth $100 to put his autograph on a Louisville Slugger in 1918. When Ruth got the check, he wrote John “Bud” Hillerich a thank-you note, which H & B discovered in its packed archives on the move back to Louisville.

Despite the decline of wood bats, H & B has sales of $100 million a year and manufactures baseball gloves, PowerBilt golf clubs, hockey sticks and, most recently, the wood handles for the 11,000 torches that will be carried in a cross-country relay to Atlanta for the Summer Olympics.

When Olympic official Jeff Cravens first gripped one of the torch handles in December, he was struck by a childhood memory of his favorite Louisville Slugger model. “This,” he said, “is almost the same diameter of my old Jackie Robinson.”

Times researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.