Exploring America’s Innovation
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What do you imagine a bat company might make before they branch out into baseball bats?
That’s right, Butter Churns! Hear Rick Redman, VP of Communications at Louisville Slugger tell the amazing story of how the company went from simple woodworking to an internationally recognized name. All because a boy loved a baseball player.
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We had a great “behind the ropes” tour with Rick Redman, the VP of Customer Communications at Louisville Slugger. It makes the most sense to start this post where our tour ended, in the Slugger Museum. Inside the front door there’s a butter churn.. huh, what’s that got to do with baseball bats? Well, that’s what we asked and here’s what Rick told us.
Louisville Slugger – Beginnings
We found this to be an amazing story that really highlighted what we’d been hearing throughout the Innovators Road Trip – innovation usually comes from improving or building something based on a product that already exists.
Back to baseball.
In the early days of baseball (and still today), players would try anything to get a little edge. Rick told us a story about how players traveling in the area playing games would often sneak out of the hotel early in the morning and wait outside the Slugger factory so they could get in first (and get the best wood) when they opened the doors. Talk about competition!
Early on the company hand-turned all of the bats they made on a lathe. This relatively time consuming process limited their production capacity, but the personal attention they gave each player helped them build a strong brand that’s kept them in business for 125 years!
During our tour, Rick introduced us to Tom, who had been working in the factory for 39 years. He’s currently working on MLB player bats (all done with a computerized lathe), but he started out hand turning bats on a lathe and offered to show us how it’s done. Check out the video below:
Now take a look at how long it takes to produce the same bat with today’s technology.
Making a major league bat takes even more precision. Slugger has one machine that they use to produce bats for MLB players. It cost them $1M and uses a computer to store all of the individual players specific characteristics and make bats to match.
Pretty cool stuff, but not as cool as seeing the pile of wood stock that Pedroia’s going to use to bring Boston another World Series title this year. 
/jim
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The following is a portion of our conversation with Rick Redman, VP, Corporate Communications of Louisville Slugger and Vickie Boisseau, Director of Sales and Marketing as they discuss the science and research that has gone behind their Bionic gloves. Really fascinating stuff!
/colin
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It’s important to point out that Jeff named this post while driving down a highway in the pouring rain. He’s good like that… quick to come up with a self deprecating comment.
Anyhow, near the end of the Louisville Slugger tour they gave us the opportunity to take batting practice using replicas of those they made for current or future Hall of Fame players like Ted Williams (Jim), Ken Griffey Jr (Jeff/John/Colin ), Ty Cobb (it was too heavy to even pick up) and Manny Ramirez (none of us are ready to go there yet).
We only captured video of one of us in the cage (Jeff), which is fortunate for the rest of us. Collectively, we hit a series of squibs, weak grounders, foul tips and ankle breakers. It wasn’t pretty. And the balls were only coming at us at 40 mph (sigh).
Whose bat would you like to swing in a batting cage? They could probably arrange it if you made the trip to Louisville.
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During our tour of the Louisville Slugger facility we heard a very interesting story about a visit Ted Williams paid to the factory back in his playing days. Apparently, he’d placed an order for bats and as was customary at the time he stopped by Slugger during a tour his ballclub was making to the area.
Ahead of his visit a factory worker checked all the bats for size, shape and weight and found nine of the ten were identical on all counts. One weighed slightly more than the other nine (it was one tenth of an ounce heavier). The worker made an indistinguishable mark on the one “off” bat and waited for Mr. Williams’ arrival.
When Ted came to the factory and handled the bats, he quickly decided one wasn’t right. The worker took the bat back and shuffled it in with the other bats and asked Ted to prove he could sense the difference a second time. Sure enough, after handling all the bats he handed one to the worker and said, “This one’s a little off.” And he was right!
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