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Published: February 7th 2012
Mini bat and Big bat
One of the smallest bats available in front of the largest. The sculpture is seven stories tall.Today dawned cold, rainy, and miserable.
I decided to spend the morning somewhere more reasonable, hiding in my room catching up on paperwork.
The rain finally stopped during the afternoon, and I had time to see things.
I ultimately decided on one of Louisville’s biggest contributions to pop culture and an unmissable tourist trap.
Louisville Slugger Factory
Johann Fredrich Hillerich was a German immigrant in the late 1800s who was a very good woodworker.
He made ice chests.
Louisville at the time was home to an early major league baseball team, the
Eclipse.
One of the players,
Pete Browning, asked Hillerich to make a bat for him.
Hillerich, after much deliberation, agreed.
The player liked the bat, and soon his teammates were asking for them.
Browning ultimately had a monster season in 1885 and won the Triple Crown (top batting average, highest slugging percentage, and most runs batted in).
He gave part of the credit to the bat he used, and soon, other ballplayers were asking for them.
Hillerich very quickly made more money from baseball bats than ice chests, and starting making them full time.
The bats
The original Louisville Slugger
A bat from the player that started it all quickly got the same name as one of the knick name of the player who first made them famous, the Louisville Slugger.
They are still made in Louisville, and the
factory tour is a must.
The factory resembles a highly sophisticated wood shop.
In the old days, bats were made by hand on a lathe.
Each player had a specific bat he liked in storage.
The woodworker used calipers to precisely compare the new bat to the model as they carved it.
Our guide demonstrated the process.
Some players were very picky about their bats.
Ted Williams famously once sent one back claiming its dimensions were wrong.
Measurement showed that the shaft was too big, by a single millimeter!
Ted Williams was so sensitive to the bat’s movement he could tell just by swinging it.
These days bats are made by computer controlled lathes.
These lathes turn out hundreds of them per day.
For retail and minor league bats, the lathes use a set of standard patterns.
For major league bats, each player has a specific bat pattern designed just for
Bat shop model
The factory tour prohibits photos, so this model in the museum is as close as it gets them.
This particular machine can carve the bat to micrometer precision, which is less than the width of a human hair.
Next to the machine is a rack of new bats binned by player’s names.
Players go through dozens of bats each season, which their teams buy (minor leaguers have the indignity of buying their own bats).
The guide warned us not to touch these.
After the bats are carved, the logo gets branded on the bat.
It’s done by rolling the bat over a heated iron, and the process is still done by hand.
The logo is precisely aligned across the wood grain, to show where the bat is weakest.
Players need to hit the ball anywhere but the logo.
For major league bats, the player’s name is added to the bat after the logo.
The final step is dipping the bat in a paint vat and hanging it to dry.
There is a strict list of allowed bat colors, which is dictated by Major League Baseball.
All tour members get a
miniature bat at the end as a souvenir.
It’s the
Flood of the Ohio
The Falls of the Ohio in flood. Note how the dam gates are completely surrounded, because the entire dam is under water. exact same shape as a real bat at a much smaller scale.
These have been given out practically since the company was founded.
For what it’s worth, the gift shop sells miniature balls that are the same scale as the bats.
Louisville Slugger Museum
After the tour, there is the
bat museum.
Yes, an entire museum dedicated to baseball bats.
The collection ranges from the highly informative to the inane.
The largest part is historical bats of all kinds.
They have a bat used by
Babe Ruth.
They have the bat used by
Joe DiMaggio to hit the last ball of his record hit streak.
They have a bat used by
Carl Ripkin during his consecutive games streak, and on and on.
They even have the bat that Ted Williams rejected.
One of the great ironies is that the museum was forced to buy every bat it has from the collector’s market, even though the company made them all in the first place!
The museum has a display on the
wood used for the bats.
Only American ash and maple are used for bats.
The wood
High School Float
The winning parade float from a group of high school students is only harvested from trees on the Allegheny Plateau, on the Pennsylvania-New York border.
Players historically preferred ash, but modern ones like maple, which they claim directs more power into the ball.
The museum also inadvertently makes the point that the success of the modern Louisville Slugger is as much due to clever marketing as solid workmanship.
Hillerich’s son John realized the power of celebrity endorsement early on.
He came up with the idea of paying players to use their bats exclusively.
Soon enough, permission to use the player’s name to market bats to other people became part of the deal.
Babe Ruth was paid all of $200 for his endorsement.
Currently just over half of the players in Major League Baseball are Louisville Slugger endorsers.
The museum has an entire wall of the names of players which have endorsed its bats of the years, sorted by decade.
One of Louisville’s biggest (literally) pop culture monuments is just outside the factory entrance.
It’s a
seven story metal model of a baseball bat, propped against the factory wall.
People can’t resist having their picture taken in front of
Medal of Honor Float
The float honoring local servicemen and veterans it.
I took a picture of the mini-bat in front of it.
For a while, a warehouse down the street had a huge baseball stuck in one of their windows (it’s gone now, sadly).
After the bat factory, I went to Fort Nelson Park.
The park commemorates the founding of what became Louisville.
Louisville exists were it does thanks to a long set of rapids called the
Falls of the Ohio.
They are the most significant navigation hazard on the Ohio River.
For obvious reasons, people have been trying to find ways around them since the area was first settled by pioneers.
Louisville was a logical area for boatmen to stop going down the river.
The park has a series of dioramas showing how the city has grown over the years.
The park has a view of the waterfront.
A long railroad bridge lies downstream.
Just in front of it are four large concrete gates.
These control the spillways for the dam the Army Corps of Engineers built in the 1920s to bypass the rapids.
The gates were fully open.
It’s worth
Shriner's Fire Truck
The fire truck float from the Louisville Shriner's chapter. noting that they would make no difference in any case, because they were completely surrounded by water.
The river was so high from rain that the entire dam was underwater, and may as well have not been there at all.
Derby Parade Preview
My final event of the night was the
parade preview.
On Thursday night, the Derby festival has a parade through downtown Louisville.
It’s now famous enough that they have an entire event just so people can look at the parade floats.
In reality, the event was similar to a convention.
Almost every float is sponsored by some group, and the groups used the preview to promote themselves.
The floats ranged from highly creative floats to giant balloons to blatant corporate promotion.
For the latter, a local boat dealer put one of his speedboats on a trailer and called it a float.
In the highly creative department, a local school won a contest to design a parade float.
The float was scenes of Louisville, with buildings made out of paper mache.
The most poignant was a float honoring
Medal of Honor winners.
This
Derby Princesses and admirer
A young attendee meets three of the derby princesses. year is the 150
th anniversary of the first award, and the four local living recipients were honored with a float.
The float that got the most attention was the
Derby Princesses.
The Derby Festival would not be a true southern festival without a beauty pageant; the princesses are the winners.
They all posed in front of the float in white dresses for the entire preview.
For some reason, every young girl at the festival just had to have a picture taken with them. 😊
The princess float was also the source of the prize give-away of the night, a paper crown.
Seemingly every kid (and a number of their parents) were wearing them.
I had dinner tonight at the
Bristol Restaurant.
It specializes in farm-fresh comfort food, at surprisingly moderate prices.
My dinner was quite good.
The dinner is really notable because I had my first
mint julep.
The traditional Derby drink, it consists of bourbon mixed with sugar water and crushed mint leaves.
I couldn’t stand it; it was way too sweet.
Still, I can now claim I’ve had one.
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