BAT LORE

Baseball players are a notoriously superstitious brotherhood Apparently, they have been so since the earliest days of the professional game. We have all read how many-time batting champ Wade Boggs' diet of lemon chicken presumably helped turn him into the batting phenomenon of the 1980s. Or of the pitcher who wears the same color socks through a winning streak, or the entire roster that will not permit its sweatshirts to be laundered while the team is winning. Consider the inevitable day that some superstitious club makes a serious run at the New York Giants' record of 26 straight victories. Reporters entering the clubhouse and even fans sitting in box seats will have to pray that the chemists at Right Guard can ease their way through the team's streak.

In the history of baseball it is possible that as much mystical power has been ascribed to individual bats as was enjoyed by weapons of romantic literature like King Arthur's Excalibur or Roland's Durandal. Among the most famous was Joe Jackson's weighty Black Betsy, the sight of which was rumored to send a shiver of apprehension through America League pitchers, Shoeless Joe's Black Betsy was so famous, in fact, that it became a generic name for bat, like Victrola for phonograph.

Though such matters are impossible of precise measurement it seems that batting rituals and obsessive care of bats reached a kind of crescendo in the 1920s. It may be that the players and their personal habits were receiving more press coverage than they ever had before. Another possibility is that the shift from the more deliberate place hitting to the swing-and-pray slugging introduced a greater element of chance into batting, raising at the same time the emphasis on observance of ritual and taboo.

Philadelphia Athletics' slugger Al Simmons was insistent that his bats be made from billets with a wide grain. Ted Williams was equally adamant about the use of narrow grain ash in his sticks. Williams would at times bathe his bats in alcohol in mid-summer to cool them off but was not otherwise given to superstitious behavior.

Back in the '20s there were about thirty companies making bats plus an untold number of boutique operations run by individual wood turners. The number of batmakers got as high as 65. Today there are fewer than a dozen remaining, the best known of which is Hillerich & Bradsby, who make the Louisville Slugger, Adirondack, a subsidiary of Rawlings, and the Worth Company. There are also some Japanese firms involved in manufacture for export.

At one time Hillerich & Bradsby, the largest batmaker, turned out as many as six million wooden bats a year. But with the advent of the aluminum bat, H&B's annual production of wooden sticks is down to about a million. The company remains a major supplier to professional players.

For several decades now bats have been made exclusively from white ash, grown in Northern Pennsylvania and New York. Experience has shown that the best wood for baseball bats comes from trees growing on the eastern slope of the Allegheny ridges. These trees grow straighter than their brethren on the western side and are protected in summer from the harsh afternoon sun. When you have a clientele as fussy as professional ballplayers, you have to consider such matters.

Hillerich & Bradsby owns about five thousand acres of timberland in Pennsylvania and New York and estimates that it takes about 200 thousand trees to make a season's supply of bats. The company also produces additional timber from other sources. In the old days, wood for bats used to be seasoned outdoors for between ten and eighteen months, but that process has been speeded up and wood is now dried by forced air in modern kilns.

Fifty or sixty years ago, when players still swung war clubs weighing up to 48 ounces, hickory was a popular wood. But hickory is too heavy a wood for the kind of buggy whips favored by today's sluggers. Through the years batmakers have experimented with a number of exotic woods, such as magua from Cuba, but like hickory the tropical wood proved too heavy for batters primarily interested in bat speed. White ash remains the almost universal choice for bats used by professionals.

In the 1920s players rarely used a bat under 35 ounces. Bats were simply expected to be heavy regardless of the stature of the batter. There was a general belief that you needed to get lots of wood on the ball in order to drive it. But it was in the 1920s that the importance of bat speed to distance first became apparent prompted no doubt by the example of Babe Ruth. For example, Frankie Frisch, not a big man, swung a 36-ounce bat when he came up left-handed and a 38-ouncer when he batted right. It made good sense, since Frisch was a natural right-hander and probably physically stronger from that side. Slugger Hack Wilson may have ordered bats with thin handles principally to accommodate his stubby fingers, but his practice was consistent with the move away from weight and in the direction of greater bat speed.

The specter of aluminum bats first surfaced in the early 1970s. Enterprising batmakers had experimented with a number of materials, including plastic and bamboo, looking for something that would produce a more durable (and, coincidentally, more expensive) bat than the traditional wood. The experiments were stimulated in part by the universal complaint among school administrators that they must practice economy in the purchase of athletic equipment. Even the majors briefly investigated the possibilities of using aluminum bats but pronounced the projected savings as "minimal." The switch to aluminum bats probably didn't result in any significant saving for major universities either, since their athletic budgets often matched the GNP of small, third world republics. But very early on it was discovered that an aluminum bludgeon would turn a narrow-cheated college shortstop into a junior Mark McGwire, and "economy moves" to aluminum spread faster than scandal through a faculty lounge.

The fact is that while aluminum bats are expensive they are definitely not indestructible. I have seen aluminum bats snap in two with all the frangibility of a lead pencil. But all questions of economy pale in the face of the extra distance that comes with swinging an aluminum bat.

Aluminum bats may make sense for high schools and Little League, where the kids aren't very big. Their use inflates the macho image of their charges. Aluminum has made the task of professional scouts a lot tougher. They can't be sure who has power and who doesn't until they put a wooden bat in the kid's hands. Given the extra 30 to 40 feet distance attributed to an aluminum-propelled ball, the toy bat is definitely here to stay. Aluminum bats will only depart when some chemist comes up with a substance that makes a baseball fly even father.

At a regional meeting of the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), in a mischievous moment. I posed this question to the principal speaker, a west coast college baseball coach of twenty-five years' service. Suppose, I said, an eccentric millionaire approached you with an offer to underwrite the expense of all your team equipment if you agreed to switch to wooden bats. Would you do it? The coach was an honest man. He even chuckled at the question. No, he said, he could not switch to wood bats, not even if the millionaire offered to underwrite the budget for the entire college. Aluminum bats were no longer solely an economic issue, he conceded. It was the extra distance that they gave his diamond heroes that was the key issue. Besides, he added, he had already determined that his players were so inept at swinging wood that they were likely to shatter a bat on the first swing.

The advent of aluminum bats is not entirely without benefit to the society. It virtually assures that there will be no shortage of quality white ash for professional bats.

So far as we can tell, Honus Wagner was the first big leaguer to lend his name for money in endorsing a bat. After the 1905 season, when Honus batted .363 in contrast to the league's .255, he signed with Hillerich & Bradsby. The practice spread quickly among bat manufacturers. Cleveland second baseman Napoleon "Larry" Lajoie was the second superstar to sign with Louisville Slugger. But when Hillerich & Bradsby approached Ty Cobb in 1908, the wily 21-year-old Georgian declined the standard honorarium of $75 and demanded instead the right of supervision over the turning of his bat and his own private bat bin at the Louisville plant, both of which he got. Originally the idea of burning a player's name into the bat may have been intended as a deterrent to theft. Later, manufacturers came to recognize the promotional possibilities in the practice.

The rules provide no weight limit for bats, but they may not be longer than 42 inches. No batter in this century is known to have used a 42-incher. The longest bat known to have been used in league competition was the 38-inch war club swung by outfielder Al Simmons of the Philadelphia Athletics. Simmons may have used a long bat because of his odd open batting stance, which looked as though it might make him vulnerable to the outside pitch. His record doesn't suggest that pitchers got many outside pitches past him, however.

By far the most idiosyncratic configuration for any bat of the 1920s was Heinie Groh's "bottle bat." Contemporary descriptions had the odd bat measuring 32 and 2/8 inches and weighing 48 ounces, which is highly improbable unless Heinie had some experimental models made. The Groh bats that survive in museums are 34 inches and 39 ounces, making the club almost mainstream for the period. Although Groh's contemporaries would have been free to order bats of similar style, no one did.

It is surprising that Groh was able to get clearance from the league office to use his bottle bat. Baseball brass was remarkably strict about unorthodox variations in equipment. Maybe they had been made sensitive by all the wild charges of a souped up baseball. In 1923 Babe Ruth experimented with a laminated bat, thrust upon him for approval by some ambitious batmaker. The Babe was generally pleased with it. But as soon as word of the experimental stick reached American League president Ban Johnson, he ordered it confiscated and published a reminder to all players that bats were to be made from a single piece of wood. After Johnson's departure from power in 1927, the rules makers began to vacillate on the subject of the laminated bat, never seeming able to make up their minds about the dangers the process posed. Finally, in 1939 the rules committee pronounced a total ban on laminated bats. It remained in force for fifteen years. The present rule, adopted in 1954, permits use of a laminated bat if it is made entirely from the same kind of wood and has been first submitted to the rules committee for approval.

Ruth and his laminated bat felt Johnson's wrath in part because at about the same time the Browns' Ken Williams was caught with what appeared to be a corked bat. At least Williams' bat contained an extraneous piece of wood, a small dowel inserted in the handle, of all places. Williams, a native of logging country in Southern Oregon, may have known something about the character of wood that no one else did.

Some years later Goose Goslin appeared one day with a bat that had been painted with longitudinal black and white stripes. Goose did not even get past the umpire the umpire on his way to the plate before having his bat confiscated. It is not clear why the league objected to the Goose's decorated club. In the same era Dodger pitcher Dazzy Vance was officially permitted to shred the right sleeve of his sweatshirt and let the loose ends flap as he delivered his heater, a patent effort to distract the batter.

Ty Cobb, one of the most fetish-ridden players of his era, in a moment of pure reason, may have pronounced the final word on the mysteries of hitting a baseball. "Batting," he wrote, "is a continuing problem that you solve over and over but never thoroughly master."