* Happy anniversary, Louisville Slugger

Perhaps the most synonymous name with sports equipment and the national pastime is Louisville Slugger. It’s come to be used like Kleenex, Jello, or Xerox — technically incorrect, but representative of the industry.

Hard to believe but Hillerich & Bradsby, the company that produces this piece of Americana, is in its fifth generation and 125 years old.

One reads the biographies and memoirs of older players who regale with tales of childhood poverty in which a broken bat had to be mended somehow as a matter of necessity and later, once they made it to the pro ranks, how they massaged their equipment with bottles and bones for hours to make them sturdier.

Perhaps the brand most synonymous

Among the other celebrations — which includes a renovation of the LS Museum in Louisville, KY (of all places), will be the release of Sweet Spot: 125 Years of Baseball and Louisville Slugger, a new book by David Magee and Philip Shirley. There have been a few other books under the LS brand, but most of them are instructionals. One notable exception is Louisville Slugger Presents Batting Around: A Comprehensive Collection of Hitting Achievements, Anecdotes and Analyses.

Some LS trivia:

About 40,000 trees are used each year to make Louisville Sluggers bats alone, which comes to about 1.8 million. Since its inception, the company has produced more than 100 million bats.
H&B owns about 7,500 acres of timberland in Pennsylvania and New York, and also purchases timber from other sources. The best white ash comes from parts of Pennsylvania, New York, and several other northeastern states where the terrain, soil, and climate are most favorable to its growth. Louisville Slugger also harvests its maple timber from this area.
For decades ash was the wood of choice for bats; now its about 50% with maple taking up most of the remainder.
The trees are cut into “billets,” 3″ round and 37” long solid cylinders of wood extracted in one piece from the harvested trees. They are dowelled to uniform size, inspected for defects, sorted by quality, weighed and manufactured into different sized baseball and softball bats.
Honus Wagner was the first player to sign a contract with the company (1905).
Contemporary models are lighter with larger barrels and thinner handles. Both Babe Ruth and Hank Aaron used similar shaped model bats, however, Ruth was known to order bats that weighed as much as 42 ounces. The R43 model bats Ruth used to hit his record 60 home runs in a 154 game season in 1927 were 35-1/2 inches long and weighed 38-1/2 ounces and were made from hickory. Many of Aaron’s bats weighed 33 ounces and were made from ash. Edd Roush of the Cincinnati Reds used the heaviest bat (48 ounces); Billy Goodman, who won the batting championship in 1950 while with the Boston Red Sox, used a 30 oz. bat, as did two-time MVP Joe Morgan; the longest LS bat was used by Al Simmons (38″) while the shortest bat ever ordered for regular play was a 30 1/2″ model by Wee Willie Keeler.

For more information, visit the Louisville Slugger website.