The 34-Ton Bat Read online

  From the beginning, Hillerich & Bradsby, like other bat manufacturers, had tried heavy hickory and easily shattered maple before settling on northern white ash as the best wood for a baseball bat. Fraxinus americana, specifically that grown on either side of the border between New York and Pennsylvania, is lighter than hickory but exceedingly hard, which is why tool handles and oars were—and still are—made of it.

  Bats were made harder still by players rubbing them with a cow femur, or a soda bottle, or a metal rod. Players thought doing so “tightened the grain,” making the bat denser. In the 1930s, Hillerich & Bradsby began stamping the phrases “Bone Rubbed” and “Hand Bone Rubbed” on the barrels of their bats—accompanied by a hand-and-bone symbol that looked a bit like the hand of Zeus throwing a lightning bolt. The lightning bolt itself was already on the Slugger barrel, serving as the letter Z in “Powerized,” another word coined by Hillerich & Bradsby for a process to harden the barrel of a baseball bat. The company had a genius for this adjectival poetry, sometimes using the lyrical—and accurate—phrases “Oil Tempered” and “Weather Seasoned” to create a desire among children and baseball stars alike for a Powerized, Bone Rubbed, Oil Tempered, or Weather Seasoned magic wand.

  All of these rituals served as a riposte to the bat as a symbol of violence. The level of love and care accorded them was ludicrous and often poignant. Players rubbed bats with oils and other unguents. They literally salivated over their bats, tobacco juice serving as a popular hardening agent. Bats were taken to bed, to dinner, even to the doctor. Jim Fregosi had his injected with cortisone during a slump. In short, bats have always been loved. Not loved platonically, mind you, but loved romantically, and imbued with all the rituals of midcentury courtship.

  After hitting his Shot Heard ’Round the World, Bobby Thomson was photographed late on the afternoon of October 3, 1951, evidently attempting to eat his bat, as if it were an ear of corn. A closer look revealed Thomson to be kissing it, label out, in a ritual that served two purposes: It fulfilled the request of wire-service snappers, clamoring for him to smooch the lumber. And it perpetuated the Pete Browning notion that this length of wood—long after it was felled in a forest—was a still-living organism, deserving of gratitude, appreciative of affection.

  Thomson’s bat was a thirty-four-ounce model—number 302—manufactured by Adirondack. That company was started in 1946 by a Dolgeville, New York, woodworker named Edwin McLaughlin, who found himself surrounded by white ash, in the way that Michelangelo was surrounded by Carrara marble. And so McLaughlin set to carving. That first year, he hired newly retired Giants pitcher Hal Schumacher to introduce the bats to his former teammates, one of whom—Thomson—had just completed his rookie season. By 1951, Yankees stars Johnny Mize and Phil Rizzuto—the reigning American League Most Valuable Player—were also using Adirondacks. Above that company’s brand, in script, were the words “Northern White Ash,” and just below it, “Dolgeville, New York.” Thomson made sure to display that label for the cameras as he kissed the most famous bat in baseball history. From its birth to its long and comfortable retirement, that bat made a journey of just seventeen miles—if you subtract its lively detour to the Polo Grounds—from Dolgeville to Cooperstown, where it resides to this day.

  Bobby Thomson kissing his Adirondack 302 on October 3, 1951. (National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY)

  A year before Thomson’s famous home run, Joe DiMaggio gently leaned forward in the bowels of Yankee Stadium and held his bat as if he were dipping a dance partner. At the request of photographer Herb Scharfman, DiMaggio softly kissed the barrel of the bat that had hit the game-winning homer the night before, in the tenth inning of Game 2 of the 1950 World Series. Of the two principals in the photograph—DiMaggio and his D29 Louisville Slugger—the former looks the much more wooden.

  “The Yankee Clipper seldom gets this affectionate with a bat,” read the original caption in the archive of International News Photos, “and even more rarely poses for an unusual picture like this.”

  The picture was anything but unusual—not for DiMaggio, nor for anyone else in baseball. The very next day Yankees infielder Jerry Coleman was photographed giving a pregame kiss to his “lucky bat.” It was very nearly compulsory, after an important hit, to plant one on the bat responsible. After his historic season of 1941, in which he hit safely in fifty-six consecutive games, DiMaggio was captured on film wearing an impeccable suit, seated in a leather chair, in a business office lined with leather-bound books, gently kissing his D29, as if it were a secretary with whom he was having an affair.

  DiMaggio, after all, doted on his favorite D29, which he called “Betsy Ann.” He was her jealous guardian, and had reason to be. She had been bat-napped in the middle of the Streak that summer. On June 29, between games of a doubleheader at Griffith Stadium in Washington, Joe D’s Betsy Ann was stolen from the Yankees dugout.

  He had just tied, in Game 1, George Sisler’s American League record forty-one-game hitting streak and had to use, for the next week, a D29 he had loaned to teammate Tommy Henrich. It was after DiMaggio broke Willie Keeler’s major-league record of forty-four games that Betsy Ann was anonymously returned, in good health and a plain brown wrapper, by private courier to Yankee Stadium. DiMaggio, with Betsy Ann restored to his warm embrace, kicked the Henrich bat to the curb: He signed it and donated the bat to the USO, which raffled it off at a San Francisco Seals minor-league game. Tickets cost $0.25 and the raffle raised $1,678. The great man’s parents, Giuseppe and Rosalie DiMaggio, personally handed it to the winner, whose name was Jim Osborne. As Richard Ben Cramer put it in his biography of DiMaggio: “The treatment of Joe’s relics was the surest sign of his new saintly status.” He was canonized on July 17 of that summer, when he hit safely in his fifty-sixth consecutive game, a record that has since only grown in stature and mystique.

  Ted Williams, DiMaggio’s great rival that summer, played his final game of the ’41 season on September 28, finishing the year with a .406 batting average, a milestone he celebrated by unbuttoning his jersey to the waist in the Red Sox clubhouse at Fenway Park before planting one—nose turned a shade to the right, in near-perfect parody of a matinee screen kiss—on his Louisville Slugger.

  Williams didn’t have to feign passion. He made annual spring visits to the Louisville Slugger plant. “He would hardly break stride saying hello to executives in the office, but once with ‘his boys’ in the factory, he called them by name and greeted them as old friends. Williams would soon be out of his coat and on a ladder, hand-picking timber for his bats.”

  Williams, like a possessive newlywed eyeing his wife’s waist, once complained to the company that an order of bats was too thick in the handle. Or possibly too thin. In any event, it didn’t feel right. Hillerich & Bradsby took the bats back and discovered Williams was right: They deviated from his other bats by five thousandths of an inch.

  All of which is to say that while many of those bat-kissing photographs were staged, their sentiments were almost always genuine. It is now impossible to read the original captions in the archives of the Bettmann/CORBIS photo agency without affecting the run-on voice of a newsreel narrator: “Yankee Johnny Mize places an affectionate smack on the bat he used to crash a fourth-inning homer off Dodger pitcher Joe Black at the Stadium in the fourth World Series game of 1952.” In that photo, Mize is seated at his locker, lips glued to bat barrel, menacing eyes glued to camera lens, as if a hired gumshoe has caught him red-handed in a private moment of seduction.

  Players never stopped kissing their bats. Bill Mazeroski of the Pirates did it when his home run won Game 7 of the 1960 World Series. George Brett was photographed kissing his Louisville Slugger in the 1980s. In the ’90s, Mark McGwire was caught on camera kissing the crown of his Rawlings Big Stick, a photo far more innocuous than the phrase suggests.

  The tradition dates to at least the 1920s, when the photographs began appearing: Babe Ruth, in slacks and dress shirt, photographed at his locker in Yan
kee Stadium before the 1926 World Series, his legs splayed, six bats leaning against his crotch, and a seventh—which he’s kissing—cradled in his hands. “This is the Lucky One,” read the original cutline. “Bronx, New York: Babe Ruth, Battering Bambino of the New York Yankees as he appeared kissing his favorite home run bat with which he expects to do much damage to the St. Louis Cardinals pitchers.”

  The notches Ruth carved into his R43 the next season—those notches on the gunslinger’s belt—might also have been notches on a bedpost. When it came to showing affection to their bats, players didn’t stop at first base, as it were. Richie Ashburn of the Phillies slept with his bats. Wily Mo Peña sniffed, kissed, and nibbled his bats. As a New York Met, Kevin Elster took a hot bat to bed one night, and then to lunch the next day. (“The bat picked up the check,” he insisted.)

  Babe Ruth smooching a Louisville Slugger in the Yankees’ clubhouse before the 1926 World Series. (© Bettmann/CORBIS)

  After all this courting and foreplay, it was perhaps inevitable that a player would want to do the honorable thing and put a ring on the baseball bat. And so eventually Elston Howard did just that.

  The weighted batting doughnut was invented by a construction worker from Bergenfield, New Jersey, named Frank Hamilton, who showed up at the doorstep of Elston Howard’s home one evening and asked the Yankees catcher, “How’d you like to make a million dollars?” This was in 1967, when such a question could still excite a Yankees star. And so Howard invited Hamilton into his basement.

  Hamilton, in a sense, really had reinvented the wheel. His creation was little more than a cast-iron ring, weighing five or ten pounds, coated in plastic. Yet it allowed players to stop swinging three bats simultaneously in the on-deck circle, a strange and cumbersome ritual that ended almost the instant Howard—in partnership with Hamilton—handed out the “On Deck Batting Doughnuts” to Mickey Mantle in New York, Roger Maris in St. Louis, and Willie Mays in San Francisco.

  “The batting doughnut sold by the thousands, retailing at three to five dollars,” Howard’s widow, Arlene, recalls in her memoir, Elston and Me. “Little League, high school and college teams were buying them up. By the end of the 1968 season, every major league team was using the weighted batting doughnut.”

  Alas, when one flew off a bat in Minnesota, striking a softball umpire, the umpire sued Howard’s company, and in the two years it took Howard and Hamilton and a third partner to acquire a patent, other companies began to make and market their own doughnuts. Howard made little money off the venture and was left—on the balance sheet as on the bat—one weighty doughnut.

  Howard and his partners weren’t the only alchemists at the time attempting to impose metal onto northern white ash. The year after Frank Hamilton produced his cast-iron doughnut, a California archery outfit manufactured its first aluminum bat, for a private label.

  That company was founded by James Douglas Easton. As a fifteen-year-old in Watsonville, California, near Monterey Bay, Easton was hunting one day in 1921 when a shotgun that was leaning against a car fell over. The gun went off, shooting Easton in both legs.

  During his yearlong convalescence, in 1921 and ’22, Doug Easton was given a book called Hunting with the Bow and Arrow, which got him interested in archery. To pass the time, the boy began to make his own bows out of yew, cedar, and pine. He was a kind of Bud Hillerich of the bow and arrow, interested in craftsmanship and performance and aesthetic beauty.

  As Easton lay in bed, experimenting with arrows, a man named William A. Shroyer Jr. tried to build a better baseball bat. Shroyer received United States patent 1,499,128 in 1922 for a metal baseball bat with shifting weights in its barrel. A year later, patent 1,611,858 went to one “Lloyd Middlekauff” for his bat of steel.

  Easton, meanwhile, made a full recovery from his hunting injuries and went on to open his own archery shop in Los Angeles, where he met, and made bows for, Hollywood stars newly enamored of archery. By 1939, he was experimenting with a novel material for the shafts of his increasingly popular arrows. That material was aluminum, from the Latin alum, which means “bitter salt,” as makers of wooden bats would discover three decades later, when the metallic ping of aluminum bats sounded like a death knell for their ash and hickory predecessors.

  Unlike the metal bats of the 1920s, Easton’s aluminum bats of the early 1970s were not prohibitively heavy, thanks in part to metal-thinning innovations that Easton had previously perfected on the company’s arrows and ski poles.

  Aluminum mimicked, then quickly exceeded, white ash as a driver of baseballs. Hillerich & Bradsby were slow to respond to the threat, initially dismissing aluminum as a fad. But the metal’s takeover of the amateur game was astonishingly swift and comprehensive. In 1971, aluminum was approved for use in Little League Baseball, and future big leaguer Lloyd McClendon that year hit five home runs in five at bats for his Gary, Indiana, team at the Little League World Series. He was intentionally walked in each of his other five plate appearances.

  In three short years, between 1971 and 1974, when the NCAA approved aluminum bats for college baseball, wood bats had become the specialist tool of professional players.

  Testifying in a 1975 patent suit, Dick Groat, the retired Pirates shortstop who had won the National League batting title sixteen years earlier, could only venture that aluminum would not be used in the big leagues “in the next five or six years.” Such bats, he said, would pervert the record book, allowing players to hit sixty to seventy home runs a season. It was a ridiculous figure otherwise unreachable without aluminum or—though Groat didn’t say so at the time—some other performance-enhancing wonder substance.

  Hillerich & Bradsby frantically played catch-up in the 1980s. By the end of that decade, half the bats the company produced were aluminum, its annual wood bat production having fallen from 7 million to 1.5 million. “I certainly see a time in the not-too-distant future when everyone will be using some alternative bat—aluminum, graphite, or some composite,” Jack Hillerich, Bud’s grandson, told Sports Illustrated that summer. “A wood bat is a financially obsolete deal.… The time will come when even the majors will use aluminum or graphite.”

  The cover of the magazine featured Gregg Jefferies of the Mets breaking his bat in mid-swing. The ash splintered like a shipwrecked Spanish galleon, the relic of a distant age. Above the photo ran a cover line that doubled as an epitaph: WOOD BATS ARE DOOMED.

  Doug Easton didn’t live to see aluminum bats, their barrels emblazoned with his name, take over baseball. On New Year’s Eve of 1972—equidistant between aluminum’s adoption by Little League and its approval by the NCAA—he died at age sixty-five. Still, he might have known that aluminum would come to dominate baseball, as it had done in archery, for time’s arrow flies in one direction only: forward.

  And yet, forty years after aluminum bats were introduced, and more than twenty years after Jack Hillerich predicted wood’s demise at the major-league level, big-league bats were still hewn from trees. The premature epitaph—WOOD BATS ARE DOOMED—remained right, just not for the right reason.

  By 2012, pro players’ wood bats were under imminent threat not from aluminum but from an Asian monster laying waste to the landscape in the manner of Mothra, Godzilla’s nemesis.

  Except that this monster—an insect called the emerald ash borer—is smaller than the penny’s portrait of Lincoln. With its purple abdomen and metallic-green wings, the EAB is, like so many of nature’s deadliest forces, profoundly beautiful. Though no one can say for certain, the bug is believed to have arrived in North America as a stowaway in a shipping container. It was first discovered in 2002, in suburban Detroit, and its spread in the decade that followed was swift and pitiless.

  This nonnative scourge—with no natural predators—swept north and east across fourteen states, killing more than fifty million ash trees and counting. Once it has infested a tree, the EAB kills it within five years—often in half that time. The U.S. Department of Agriculture urges people never to transport fire
wood from home to a summer campsite or cottage. The ash borer, in the words of the USDA, is “the Green Menace,” its devastation potentially equal to that of chestnut blight and Dutch elm disease, two other arboreal epidemics that essentially wiped those trees from the American landscape, their only trace the countless Chestnut and Elm Streets where once their namesakes stood.

  The fungus that became known as chestnut blight was discovered in 1904. Four billion chestnut trees were abruptly felled, a quarter of the entire tree canopy of the eastern United States. By the time Mel Tormé and Bob Wells wrote of “chestnuts roasting on an open fire,” in 1944, chestnuts were very nearly extinct.

  In the pantheon of endangered American icons, the ash baseball bat appears headed for the same fate as the roasting chestnut. The year the emerald ash borer was discovered, in 2002, ash was coming under attack on two fronts, the second being the rapid spread of maple bats around Major League Baseball.

  That year, Barry Bonds was coming off a record seventy-three-home-run season for the San Francisco Giants. Each of those home runs was hit with a maple bat made by Canadian craftsman Sam Holman, who was building sets at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa in the mid-1990s when a friend—a baseball scout named Bill MacKenzie—challenged him, over beers at the Mayflower Bar, to make a longer-lasting wooden bat. Holman made his first bat in the shed next to his house, using a length of maple left over from a stair rail he’d built.

  Holman took his first batch of bats to Toronto, where he persuaded Blue Jays star Joe Carter to use them in batting practice. Carter liked how hard the bats were, as did several teammates, and soon Sam Holman’s Sam Bats were catching on in the big leagues, most famously with Bonds, whose colossal success had hitters pining, as it were, for maple.