Baseball Bats Brand

There are many different brands of baseball bats. The most famous and well known company is probably Louisville Slugger – there wooden bat has been used since the late 1800s. Other companies that are popular today include Easton, DeMarini, Rawlings, and Wilson Sporting Goods.

The Louisville Slugger has a famous story behind its inception, one that is part of the tradition and history of baseball. In Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1880s, a 17-year-old kid and amateur baseball player named John A. “Bud” Hillerich took some time off from is father’s woodworking shop to take in a baseball game. There, he witnessed Pete Browning, the Louisville Eclipse’s star baseball player, have a hard time breaking his slump. So Bud took Browning back to his father’s woodshop where J.F. Hillerich produced a baseball bat for the player. The next day, he hit three home runs and all his teammates wanted the same kind of bat. However, it was not an overnight success – Bud had to convince his father that manufacturing baseball bats would be more profitable than the stair railings and porch columns J.F. wanted to create. At one point, the woodshop even turned away baseball players. Soon enough, his father came around and they began to create what is now one of today’s most famous baseball bat brands. Their patent for the “Louisville Slugger” was registered in 1884. Today, the company is owned by Hillerich & Bradsby, and it also produces the series TPX, another popular baseball bat brand.

Other Brands

Louisville Slugger’s main competition for aluminum bats is Easton Sports. Rawlings, a company founded in 1887, began as a retail store in St. Louis, Missouri. It started making gloves for baseball, altering the way first-base gloves were designed by creating a deep-well pocket and later in 1946 the company produced gloves made specifically for every position. It was not until almost 100 years after its founding that Rawlings began getting into the business of bats – which it did in 1970 when it hooked up with already established baseball bat brand Adirondack.

DeMarini was created in the late 1980s after its founder and a softball player, Ray DeMarini, wanted to create bats that, as he perceived, were not “juiced.” He hired engineer Mike Eggiman and together they created DeMarini Doublewall, the first multi-walled bat. DeMarini also created bats for massive players (called Fatboy) and one for youth leagues (called Black Coyote.)