Maine to Texas: Batter Up - Home of the Louisville Slugger

Neither of us are big baseball fans but we like factory tours and this tour seemed like it would be very interesting.

The Big Bat was a great beginning to the Louisville Slugger Factor and Museum.

120 feet long, 9 feet in diameter, 68,000 pounds.  Made from carbon steel and hand painted to look like wood.  It is hollow.  It was put here October 21, 1995.

It is an exact-scale replica of the model R43, 34” wood bat, designed to specifications requested by Babe Ruth in the early 1920s.

The Hillerich Family started out making butter churns.  They turned their first pro bat in 1884.

Tickets for the museum and factory tour are $16 ($15 senior, over 60).  There is a lot to see, plus you get a great souvenir after the tour.

We had a little time before our tour started to start looking at the large museum.

In this area you can put on gloves and hold bats that were actually used by the players.  There is at least one bat from every major league team.  You can hold a bat that Mickey Mantle used or Derek Jeter.  There were a lot of famous people on this wall.

There are a lot of bats displayed but other things to look at too.

In 1927, Babe used, and notched, this Louisville Slugger bat for 21 of his record-setting 60 home runs that year.

While waiting for our tour we watched a hand turning demonstration.

We got to hold a lot of bats.

There are all weights and lenghts of bats.  A pro bat can be as heavy as you want but it has to weigh at least 2 pounds.

From 1942-45 Hillerich & Bradsby made M1 Carbine gunstocks out of hickory wood for the US Armed Forces.  They averaged 1800 gunstocks per day for a total of more than 1.5 million.

The displays are very nice and easy to see.

Ty Cobb

Lou Gehrig

Our tour started with a short movie showing the forests and mills where every Louisville Slugger bat begins.

There were no photos allowed on the factory floor but there are large windows outside the factory where you can take some pictures.

Only the billet’s are sent to the factory from the mill.

There are a couple of different ways to cut out the billet.

Method #1 (on the left) is to use a special guided boring machine that extracts billets directly from an intact log.  This method produces the maximum number of billets per log.

Method #2 (on the right) is the split and turn method.  Workers split logs into triangular bolts then turn each bolt on a lathe to create a billet.  This method is used on logs with a spiral grain structure that requires hand splitting.

At every station we would see the machines and workers working on the bats and a video would show the process up-close while our guide explained the process.  There were so many times I wanted to pull out my camera!

These bats were completed but still needed the ends cut off.

We passed large bins of the end pieces and were told to take as many as we wanted.

We watched the workers dipping these bats in paint and hanging them to dry.

More bats drying. 

This factory makes both pro bats and bats for the general public.

The pros like the ends of the bats hollowed out to make them lighter.

You can buy a custom bat.

For an additional fee you can go into the bat vault.  The oldest bats in the vault are 100 years old.  There are over 3,000 original bat models in the vault.  We didn’t pay the extra but there are windows to see into the vault and there are plenty of bats outside the vault to hold.

Bat vault.

The museum is large.  They were having a little Halloween fun.

There is a batting cage where you can hit replica bats of Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, etc.  Outside the batting cage is a very large baseball glove sitting area. 

This 34,000 pound glove is sculpted from Kentucky limestone.  It’s 12 feet long, 9 feet wide, and 4 feet high.  The front doors had to be removed when it was delivered on July 21, 1998.

We were each given a mini souvenir bat after our tour.

Over 8,000 pros have signed contracts.  These are 10 year contracts which mean they can only use Louisville Slugger bats during that time.

There is a large gift shop.

Remember the trimmed ends we were told to take?  We picked up a couple.

This tour is certainly magnet (or two) worthy.

The tiny souvenir bats are fun.  I’ll have to find a way to display one of them.

After our tour Mark found a nice disc golf course to play. 

Next time: Tennessee