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The 34-Ton Bat Page 5


  That baseball instantly joined other artifacts—notably, a cast-iron cross of beams salvaged from the wreckage—as symbols of hope and recovery in the days after 9/11. Mavaro, a Mets fan, offered the baseball to the Baseball Hall of Fame, which put it in a traveling exhibit. That exhibit was called, inevitably, “Baseball as America,” but might as well have been titled “The Baseball as America.”

  Like Spalding’s baseball-shaped funeral wreaths, the baseball offered token comfort to the grieving. As the twenty-first century dawned, the baseball—five continents united in a uniquely American object—had become a kind of white immortelle in its own right.

  Chapter 2

  STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN

  On a map, St. Kitts and Nevis is a Rorschach test: one nation comprising two islands that look like different things to different people around the world.

  Depending on what you read, narrow St. Kitts is shaped like “a guitar,” “a paddle,” or “a pineapple lying on its side.” In tandem with circular Nevis, the two islands resemble “a sperm whale swimming away from a giant beach ball,” “an upside-down ice cream cone,” and “a tennis racquet and ball.”

  These and other analogies—made in every Caribbean guidebook, cruise-line pamphlet, and travel agent’s brochure—tend toward the tropical. They evoke—and are often meant to inspire—vacations. The smaller of the two islands has been called “sombrero-shaped Nevis.”

  The World Factbook, prepared by the Central Intelligence Agency for the use of U.S. government officials, describes the geography of 266 countries and dependencies without rhetorical filigree—or at least it does until you get to St. Kitts and Nevis.

  “With coastlines in the shape of a baseball bat and ball,” reads the CIA’s entry on that nation, “the two volcanic islands are separated by a 3-km-wide channel called The Narrows; on the southern tip of long, baseball bat–shaped St. Kitts lies the Great Salt Pond; Nevis Peak sits in the center of its almost circular namesake island and its ball shape complements that of its sister.”

  To American eyes, the coastlines do look like a baseball bat and ball. But they just as closely conjure a turkey leg and dollop of mashed potatoes. Perhaps it was a spring day, shortly after lunch, when a sated CIA officer wrote the Factbook entry for St. Kitts and Nevis, and thus saw a bat and ball instead of Thanksgiving dinner.

  It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the CIA was preoccupied with the physical objects of baseball. In 2003, when George W. Bush, former owner of the Texas Rangers, was president, the United States went to war in Iraq on the testimony of a single Iraqi defector. That informant claimed—falsely, it turned out—to have worked in a biological weapons plant in his homeland. The man’s name was Rafid Ahmed Alwan al-Janabi, but he is better known to history by his CIA cryptonym: Curveball.

  When Bush’s father, the former CIA director George H. W. Bush, was president, he kept his 1945 first baseman’s mitt from Yale, a Rawlings Claw, in a desk drawer. He would sometimes pound his fist into the pocket when considering counsel. In 1990, the United States went to war in the Persian Gulf. The first missile fired in Operation Desert Storm bore the oval logo of the Louisville Slugger, hand-painted by personnel aboard the ship from which it was launched, the USS Louisville.

  Desert Storm was the prequel to the Iraq War. It is a straight line from the Louisville Slugger to Curveball. All of which is to say that where there’s a ball, it’s in our nature to see a bat. And where there’s a bat, it’s in our nature to find a ball. The impulse—to judge by St. Kitts and Nevis—may even be in nature itself.

  Early bats, befitting that pioneer age, were hewn from wagon tongues and axles. As in golf, specialized implements arose for striking the ball in a specific way. Some bats had a flat face, as on a cricket bat, to better exploit bunting. The short-lived banana bat was curved, like a jai alai cesta, to apply spin to the batted ball.

  Many bats didn’t taper at the handle at all, so that the batter—like the housewife in a ’50s sitcom—appeared to be brandishing a rolling pin at the pitcher. Napoleon Lajoie got many of his 3,242 hits with a two-knobbed bat, the upper knob designed to support his upper hand. That very phrase—upper hand—is synonymous with a dominant advantage.

  At the turn of the last century, catalogs offered several brands of mushroom bat, the most famous of which was A. G. Spalding’s: Instead of a small knob at the end, the handle appeared to be detonating a large mushroom cloud. The bat industry, likewise, was exploding at the dawn of the twentieth century, most notably in Louisville, Kentucky.

  The reluctant father of that explosion came—like Einstein and Oppenheimer, fathers of the nuclear mushroom cloud—from a German family with an eye on America. Johann Frederich Hillerich emigrated from Baden-Baden and settled—after a short residence in Baltimore—in Louisville, where photographs always feature him with a long beard, the worst possible affectation for a woodworker determined to spend life over a belt-driven lathe.

  But Hillerich was, in every other respect, averse to risk. His woodworking shop, J. F. Hillerich, Job Turning, opened for business in 1864 and would soon produce wooden bedposts and balusters, tenpins and bowling balls, porch columns, and other items for the growing middle class. His creations were cozily domestic, if a little sleep-inducing. He wanted to build beautiful staircases for respectable homes. He had great success with a swinging butter churn, the “dairy swing churn,” in which the butter was gently rocked rather than hand-agitated. The dairy swing churn could accommodate an attachment for rocking babies to sleep, and Hillerich’s story would be equally narcotizing (and long forgotten) if not for the apprenticeship he offered, in 1884, to his seventeen-year-old son, John (Bud) Hillerich.

  Bud was American born, with an American nickname and an American passion for baseball. According to the most persistent of the various creation myths that surround his invention, Bud attended a game at Eclipse Park one afternoon, when the eccentric star of the Louisville Spiders, Pete Browning, broke a bat. The loss of that bat was not inconsequential, especially if you imbued bats with personalities, as many players did and still do. According to his biographer, Philip Von Borries, Browning kept a store of his retired bats—broken or otherwise bereft of hits—that he named after biblical figures.

  In the grand narrative of his improbable life, Browning knew personal bereavement, which began early, with the loss of both his hearing (to a condition called mastoiditis) and his father (to a cyclone).

  He was barely literate and frequently drunk. A typical dispatch—this one from the New York Times—began: “Just before the game to-day, ‘Pete’ Browning, who has been on a howling drunk, was fined $110 by manager Kelley, of the Louisvilles.”

  Occasionally seized by daydreams on the field, Browning was leading off first base in a game against St. Louis in 1886 when pitcher Dave Foutz walked over to the bag and tagged him out for an exceedingly rare unassisted pickoff.

  The next season, with his team bound for Cincinnati and a weekend series, Browning was left behind in Louisville when he was “too intoxicated to find his way to the train.” He arrived in Cincinnati in time for the Sunday game, “but he was still suffering from the effects of his debauch.” With his team down 2–0, Browning hit a double to lead off an inning that day. But “he played about fifteen feet off second base,” an eyewitness wrote, “and fell asleep there. The ball was passed to McPhee, who walked up and put him out to the intense disgust of the spectators.”

  Browning had literally been caught napping off second, but considered the drink essential to his game. “The Gladiator drank more than was necessary to ‘keep his lamps in good trim,’ ” according to an 1890 newspaper account, referring to Browning’s extraordinary eyes, which he called his lamps, lampterines, or peepers. “Still, he played good ball.”

  Browning became one of the best ballplayers of his day despite—he would have said because of—these and other eccentricities, which were myriad. He fielded fly balls on one leg, refused to slide into bases, always stepped on third o
n his way to play the outfield, and thought gazing directly into the sun improved his eyesight. He once held his head out the window of a moving train all the way from Louisville to Cincinnati for the benefit of his lamps. For the same reason, he bathed his eyes daily in buttermilk.

  All of which is to suggest that Browning was open to experimentation, a different way of looking at things, when Bud Hillerich approached him after a game and said he could turn a new and customized bat to replace the one he’d broken. Which Bud promptly did, down at his father’s shop, the white wood shavings collecting on his forearms like fallen snow.

  Bud Hillerich turning a Louisville Slugger. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  It’s a legend long burnished, if unconfirmable, so that it now resembles a lacquered bat spotlighted in a museum: Browning got three hits with Bud’s bat the next day, told his teammates about it, and thus began a sideline for young Bud Hillerich, who made bespoke baseball bats over the strenuous objections of his father, a man loath to associate his business with the rogues and ne’er-do-wells who played baseball professionally.

  J. Frederich Hillerich had every reason to fear the game. That same year, 1884, Terry Larkin had signed with the Richmond Virginians despite the events of a year before, when he had shot his wife and slit his own throat. The 1884 season also saw umpire Billy McLean, a former boxer and the first professional ump, throw a bat into a crowd of hecklers in Philadelphia. When the Baltimore Orioles put up a barbed-wire fence on June 13 of that summer, the club aimed to protect the players and umpires from the paying customers, though the fence also worked to protect the paying customers from umps like McLean.

  And so J. Frederich Hillerich wanted to make balusters, not baseball bats. But the ballplayers came, and neither he nor the professional ballplayers could long ignore the growing reputation and undeniable quality of the “Falls City Sluggers” turned out by his shop. By 1894, the bats were rebranded—and trademarked—as the Louisville Slugger, a nickname bestowed by newspapers as early as 1891 on Pete Browning. J. Frederich, who enjoyed turning a profit even more than a bedpost, made Bud a partner in 1897, renaming their company J. F. Hillerich & Son.

  Bud loved haunting ballparks and hanging out with ballplayers and befriended Louisville Colonels star Honus Wagner, among many others. By the time Wagner was a Pittsburgh Pirate, and perhaps the game’s preeminent player, Bud signed him to the company’s first exclusive endorsement contract, branding Wagner’s signature on the barrel of the bat and selling that model in retail stores.

  That was 1905, the same year Louis Rogers (Pete) Browning died, aged forty-five, after serving a two-week, court-ordered tenure in a lunatic asylum. He was buried, not entirely forgotten, beneath a headstone that managed to misspell his name as Lewis. He had lived his entire life in the house in which he was raised, a house he shared, until the day he died, with his mother, Mary Jane. He never took a wife but kept—as he once told the Louisville Courier-Journal—that harem full of customized baseball bats, which he stored in the basement, “all oiled and rubbed.”

  As an official endorser of the Louisville Slugger, Wagner was followed by Ty Cobb, who was followed by the Philadelphia A’s Harry Davis, who was followed by Nap Lajoie, who abandoned his Wright & Ditson double-knobber for the single-knobbed sublimity of J. F. Hillerich & Son.

  While they were turning out custom bats for the game’s biggest stars, the Hillerichs were also making cheaper bats, under private labels, for the recreational market. Their biggest buyer was Simmons Hardware, a national behemoth whose 1909 catalog ran to five thousand pages, and whose young salesman Frank Bradsby so impressed J. Frederich that he sold him the entire business in 1911, for $125,000, essentially cutting his own son, Bud, out of the business he had helped to build.

  Bud knew all the ballplayers, and Bradsby—who did not—instantly sold him back a stake in the company, installing him as president of the newly named Hillerich & Bradsby. In 1918, H&B signed left-hander Babe Ruth of the world champion Boston Red Sox for $100 and began manufacturing his R43 bat. In 1919, with Ruth leading the league in home runs and RBIs before his sale to the New York Yankees, Hillerich & Bradsby sold 276,000 Sluggers and started an ad campaign targeting boys. In 1923, when the Babe was a Yankee, and the Yankees opened “the House That Ruth Built,” the company sold nearly 1.7 million. Hillerich & Bradsby was the top bat seller in the world. The Hillerich name was branded on a product that all of America was swinging, and that product was not a swinging butter churn.

  On January 2, 1924, Johann Frederich Hillerich, recovering baseball skeptic, slipped on an icy street in Louisville, fractured his hip, and became ill. He died two weeks later, aged ninety, his surname forever synonymous with the game he initially sought to avoid.

  By then, the bat and its most famous endorser, Babe Ruth, were enjoying twin peaks of popularity. Within a few years, the Yankees batting order would come to be called Murderers’ Row, an apt if indelicate description, as bats had been instruments of murder almost since their inception.

  Unlike baseballs, bats never had to be weaponized. They were created as weapons, and always used as such. In 1907, when the Louisville Slugger was securing its celebrity endorsers, a man in Washington, D.C., twenty-five-year-old Delaware Ross, fractured another man’s skull with a baseball bat in an argument over which one of them owned the bat. The victim, Arthur Reed, died three days later, to little public notice.

  For years, the only bat-wielding “murderers” that captured the nation’s attention were baseball sluggers. For every home run he hit in 1927 at the heart of Murderers’ Row, Babe Ruth carved a notch on the label of his Louisville Slugger. The notches appeared to grow out of the bat’s oval brand, like a series of eyelashes, or the rays of an egg-shaped sun. He gave one such bat—with twenty-one notches—to Hillerich & Bradsby, and it’s displayed to this day in the Louisville Slugger Museum, where the notches are often described as resembling those on a gunslinger’s belt.

  While America’s most famous baseball slugger unintentionally emulated a gunman, its most famous gunman emulated a baseball slugger. Ruth hit a home run in the Yankees’ 6–5 win over the Browns in St. Louis on May 7, 1929. That night, three hundred miles away in Chicago, Al Capone threw a dinner party, ostensibly to honor three members of his crime syndicate: Joseph “Hop Toad” Giunta, Albert Anselmi, and John Scalise. The evening, by all accounts, was a bacchanal, whose honorees ate and drank until well after midnight, at which time Capone produced, to a deeply apprehensive group of guests, a baseball bat.

  The three men, whom he suspected of plotting his overthrow, were bound to their chairs in the gathering silence. At least one biographer says Capone “took up a batter’s stance.” And then, one by one, he bludgeoned Giunta, Anselmi, and Scalise, before a gunman shot each in the head. In the film The Untouchables, Capone wielded his bat while delivering a sermon on the sanctity of team play.

  If the incident occasioned any civic self-examination in Chicago, it was quickly forgotten. To this day, outside the city’s Social Security Administration building on Madison Street, there stands a 101-foot-tall baseball bat designed by Claes Oldenburg. Its official name is Batcolumn. As the plaque affixed to the sculpture reads: “Oldenburg selected the baseball bat as an emblem of Chicago’s ambition and vigor.” It was dedicated in 1977, the summer the city’s White Sox became celebrated as the “South Side Hitmen.”

  Capone, a frequent visitor to Wrigley Field, was well known as a baseball fan. On September 9, 1931, while seated with his entourage in the front row at the Friendly Confines, he summoned Cubs catcher Gabby Hartnett to sign an autograph for twelve-year-old Al Capone Jr. When Hartnett obliged, a photographer snapped a picture: the two Capones, resplendent in suits and ties and pocket squares, nearly nose to nose with the catcher. When Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis saw the photo in the next day’s papers, he wired Hartnett, ordering him to cease signing baseballs for crime bosses. Hartnett reportedly wired back, “Fine, but you tell him.


  Gabby Hartnett, Al Capone, and Sonny Capone, September 9, 1931, Wrigley Field. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  In the end, the edict proved moot: Thirty-eight days after Hartnett signed for his son, Capone was sentenced to eleven years in prison for tax evasion.

  Twelve months later at Wrigley, in the fifth inning of Game 3 of the World Series, Ruth hit his—and to that point, perhaps all of baseball history’s—most famous home run. It would go down as his “called shot.” (It would be nineteen years, almost to the day, before Bobby Thomson would eclipse Ruth with his still-more-famous Shot Heard ’Round the World.) In the overheated prose of the day, home runs were shots or blasts or bombs. But then, by World War II, baseball bats and firearms shared more than the mere language of ballistics.

  During the war, the Hillerich & Bradsby production line in Louisville also turned out M1 carbine gunstocks for American GIs. As the army was developing the baseball grenade, its soldiers were carrying rifles produced at the Louisville Slugger plant—carrying them around the world, in the manner (if not entirely in the spirit) of Albert Goodwill Spalding.

  Although ash remained abundant, other woods suffered wartime shortages. Among its many military uses, wood was employed in airplane ribbing, which is why Howard Hughes’s amphibious airplane—though primarily ribbed with birch, and officially christened the H-4 Hercules—was ridiculed in newspapers as the “Spruce Goose.”

  The basketball court at the Boston Garden grew, if you will, from the wartime wood scarcity. Celtics owner Walter Brown, in need of a floor in 1946, went with short boards of surplus Tennessee oak rather than the more traditional but expensive long boards of maple. The short boards were grouped together in five-foot-by-five-foot squares and arranged in a parquet mosaic not because the pattern was attractive but because it was cheap.