![]() ![]() 5īy trial and error, ash and hickory emerged as the most popular woods for bat-making in the 1870s and ’80s. 4 Ash, maple, and pine were also favorite woods of batters in the earliest days of the game. For a short time, the cricket-favored willow was the preferred choice. Early bats were often flat - like cricket bats - and most were handmade from various trees such as sycamore, cherry, spruce, chestnut, poplar, and basswood. Some bats came from tree limbs and some began their life as ax handles. The earliest bats were quite primitive, akin more to a “club” than what we think of as a bat in the twenty-first century. This “bring your own bat” to the game resulted in many different sizes, shapes, and species of wood. ![]() ![]() 2 This article focuses on MLB bats and the renewable material called wood.ĭuring the mid-1840s, when the Knickerbockers were playing the game under their rules, all players were responsible for their own bat. The book Baseball as America, issued jointly by the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum and the National Geographic Society, argues that professional baseball has stuck with a wooden bat for numerous reasons, including safety, competitiveness, and the preservation of tradition. In fact, at the highest level of baseball - and its blood-brother cricket - the object used to strike the ball is fashioned from a tree. Even bat wood species have transitioned from hickory and the traditional ash to maple, which dominates today in major-league baseball (MLB).Īs baseball and its people have changed, the use of wood to make bats has not. ![]() Over the centuries, baseball bat shapes have undergone all kinds of contortions: Bat diameters have expanded and contracted and lengths have varied. Heinie Groh of the Cincinnati Reds had one of the most distinctive bats in baseball history, a “bottle bat” which had about a 17-inch barrel that tapered sharply to a thin handle. ![]()
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