Tool Of The Trade Essay
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In any game, the equipment players
use determines the way the game unfolds. Try to imagine a soccer game played
with an American football! Or try playing tennis with the wooden racquets
of thirty years ago. Change the equipment, and you discover a very different
game. As part of my look at baseball, I decided to examine the tool of
the baseball trade: Bats.
Perhaps the most crucial and visible
tool in baseball is the bat. A bat is the offensive weapon, the tool with
which runs are scored. To understand the history and science of bats, I
read a magazine published by Louisville Slugger, in Louisville, Kentucky
home of the Hillerich & Bradsby Company, Inc. (also known as H&B),
the manufacturers of perhaps America's most famous bat, the Louisville
Slugger. Through the reading I learned how the modern bat came to be, and
what it might become.
In 1884, John Andrew "Bud" Hillerich
played hooky from his father's woodworking shop and went to a baseball
game. There he watched a star player, Pete "The Old Gladiator" Browning,
struggling in a batting slump. After the game, Hillerich invited Browning
back to the shop, where they picked out a piece of white ash, and Hillerich
began making a bat. They worked late into the night, with Browning giving
advice and taking practice swings from time to time. What happened next
is legend.
The next day, Browning went three-for-three,
and soon the new bat was in demand across the league. H&B flourished
from there. First called the Falls City Slugger, the new bat was
called the Louisville Slugger by 1894. Though Hillerich's father thought
bats were an insignificant item, and preferred to continue making more
dependable items like bedposts and bowling pins, bats became a rapidly
growing part of the family business.
Just as it was back then, the classic
Louisville Slugger bat used by today's professional players is made from
white ash. The wood is specially selected from forests in Pennsylvania
and New York. The trees they use must be at least fifty years old before
they are harvested. After
harvest, the wood is dried for six to eight
months to a precise moisture level. The best quality wood
is selected for pro bats; the other 90
percent is used for consumer market bats. White ash is used for its
combination of hardness, strength, weight, "feel," and durability.
In past years, H&B have made
some bats out of hickory. But hickory timber is much heavier than
ash, and players today want light bats because they've discovered that
they can hit the ball farther by swinging the bat fast. So they can't make
the bats out of hickory. Though Babe Ruth, one of the all-time great
home-run hitters, used a 42 or a 44 ounce bat, players today use bats that
weigh around 32 ounces. Even sluggers like Mark McGwire and Ken Griffey,
Jr. only use 33 ounce bats because they want to generate great bat speed.
How do you make a wooden bat you
ask. Here’s how. The wood is milled into round, 37 inch blanks,
or billets, which are shipped to the H&B factory in Louisville.
There they are turned on a tracer lathe, using a metal template that guides
the lathe's blades. These templates are set up to the specifications of
each pro player.
Then the bats are fire-branded with
the Louisville Slugger mark. This mark is put on the flat of the wood's
grain, where the bat is weakest. Players learn to swing with the label
facing either up or down, so that they can strike the ball with the edge
grain, where the bat is strongest. Hitting on the flat grain will more
often than not result in a broken bat.
Finally, the bats are dipped into
one of several possible water-based "finishes" or varnishes, which gives
bats their final color and protective coat. Each player selects the finish
they desire, while a few players, such as former Kansas City Royals star
George Brett, chose to leave their bats unfinished.
Players today may go through as many
as six or seven dozen bats in a season. (In early years, players used only
use ten or twelve bats.) In fact, one player, Joe Sewell, used the same
bat for fourteen years. Joe attributes the increased breakage of
bats to the thin-handled, large-barreled design of modern bats, and to
the use of ash instead of hickory. A pitch that jams you inside will almost
always saw off a modern bat, while an aluminum or old-fashioned hickory
bat might produce a base hit.
Though the manufacturing process
for bats has stayed largely the same, the design of the pro wood bat has
changed a great deal since 1884. The early bats had very little taper,
resulting in a
bat with a very thick handle and a relatively
small barrel. The early bats almost look like someone
just took an ax handle and used it for
a bat. Modern players want a thin handle and a large barrel, to concentrate
the weight of the bat in the hitting area. By major league regulations,
bats must be round with a barrel of no more than 2 3/4 inches. They can
be up to 42 inches in length; there is no regulation about the bat's weight.
One of the few innovations to the
design of the wooden bat is cutting a "cup" out of the end of a bat. Developed
by a pro player named Jose Cardinal in 1972, this "cup" can't be more than
2 inches in width, and 1 inch deep. The cupped bat allows the bat maker
to use a heavier, denser,
stronger timber, while still maintaining
the desirable bat weight. Recently, Ted Williams visited the Louisville
Slugger Company and he said that if he was playing today, all of his bats
would be cupped. About half the pro bats made by H&B today are
cupped bats.
Throughout the history of baseball,
players in search of an edge have doctored, or altered, bats in many unusual
ways. The main strategy has been "corking" the bat. Players cut the
end of the bat off, drill a hole down into the barrel of the bat, and fill
the hole with cork, then glue the end back on. This is an attempt to lighten
the bat, and give it more spring or...
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