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Batter up! Mass. company’s
maple bats are a hit
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Thursday, April 8, 2010
Bryan Rourke
Providence Journal Staff Writer
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( This article is accompanied by a very interesting video displaying a bat being spun and shaped on a computerized lathe at the Nokona factory in Fall River. The bats can be modified for an individual player and made while they wait. Find it at :
http://www.projo.com/news/content/baseball_bats_04-08-10_GGHS9HQ_v56.3c0ff5a.html
Nokona Athletic Goods is the last company to make baseball gloves in America. It does that in Worcester. In Fall River, Nokona makes baseball bats, including bats for David Ortiz of the Red Sox.)
FALL RIVER
The baseball season has begun. The Boston Red Sox opened on Sunday. The Pawtucket Red Sox open Thursday. Both have high hopes for the season, as does one local company that has stepped to the plate for both teams: Nokona Baseball.
Three years ago, the company, now based in Fall River, began manufacturing baseball bats, and promptly broke into the major and minor leagues. Last year, the company made custom hard-maple bats for Boston’s David Ortiz and about 40 other major league players. A half-dozen PawSox players were also among its customers.
“If there’s anything a player doesn’t like, they go back and fix it,” said Carl “Goody” Goodreau, the PawSox clubhouse manager and equipment director, about the company. “They will get that bat so it’s perfect for that player.”
“The players who got them loved them,” said Goodreau. “There is nothing bad I can say about these bats.”
But two years ago, maple bats were getting a bad rap in major league ball.
Bats were breaking. Splinters were flying, endangering players and fans. So in 2008, the league conducted an investigation. From July to September it gathered 2,200 bats broken during games. Of those, 750 broke into multiple pieces, with maple outnumbering ash threefold, raising suspicions that maple bats were particularly susceptible to shattering.
The MLB panel of engineers and wood specialists found important differences between ash and maple bats. Ash best absorbs impact on the stacked edge of its grain. (Think of the side of a stack of playing cards.) Maple best absorbs impact on the face of its grain. (Think of the top of a stack of playing cards.)
“You can see the grain on an ash bat,” said Jerry O’Connor, Nokono’s CEO. “Maple [grain] is much harder to see.”
When the grain goes straight up and down the barrel of a bat, O’Connor said, the impact with a ball is absorbed throughout the bat. But if the grain angles out, the bat will eventually break at that point.
“Manufacturers were not aware of this spiral growth in maple,” O’Connor said. “Major League Baseball has to be applauded for this.”
MLB drew an important distinction between bats made of soft maple, such as silver and red maple, which has been banned from use in the professional minor leagues this year, and bats made of harder maple varieties such as those used by Nokona and most other major league manufacturers.
The league developed a dye that’s now dabbed on hard maple bats about one foot up from the handle. If the dyed grain veers off center by more than 3 degrees, the bat is banned from use. The policy went into place last season, and the effect was immediate and significant.
In 2009, MLB reported a 35-percent decline in broken bats from 2008.
And now, post investigation, hard maple is more popular than ever, and safer, too, sharing the batter’s box with less hard ash, the longstanding wood of choice for bats.“You get more pop,” O’Connor said. “You hit the ball farther. It’s physics.”
Barry Bonds popularized the physics in 2001 by using hard-maple bats to set the single-season home run record while playing for the San Francisco Giants. (Bond’s alleged use of performance-enhancing steroids arose later.)
In addition to last year’s maple-monitoring system, MLB instituted new bat dimensions this year to further reduce breakage: the maximum barrel diameter has decreased from 2.75 inches to 2.61; and the handle has increased 1/50th of an inch.
Bats have changed a lot over their history, according to Louis Ledoux, Nokona’s operations manager and a managing partner. Bats back in the time of Babe Ruth were thick through the handle. Now they’re not. Handles are thin. Barrels are big.
“Players like the way the bat whips more,” Ledoux said. “To get a bigger [barrel] bat, you’ve got to get the weight from somewhere. They’re taking it from the handle.”
Nokona is one of 33 companies sanctioned by Major League Baseball to manufacture bats, some 35,000 a year. The company began in 1926 as a maker of leather goods in Nocona, Texas, and started manufacturing baseball gloves in 1934.
In 2006, the company moved its glove-making operations to Worcester, and, in 2008, it opened up a 12,000-square-foot bat-manufacturing plant in Fall River. Besides Ortiz of the Red Sox, other major league customers have included Alfonso Soriano of the Chicago Cubs, Miguel Cabrera of the Detroit Tigers and Vladimir Guerrero of the Texas Rangers, according to the company.
Of the bats Nokona makes, 85 percent are maple, 15 percent are ash. And both woods are the best available, although 10 percent of the maple billets the company receives fail the grain-dye test.
“We are very fussy,” Ledoux said. “Wood that’s not good enough for baseball bats is downgraded and used as furniture.”
When I was a kid I loved to play baseball. My brothers and I, our dad, grandfather, my uncle, even my mom were baseball fanatics. My grandfather on my dad's side used to barn storm with a semi-pro baseball team as a catcher before the current minor league system was being fully developed and such teams were feeders for the big leagues. Everyone except my dad was a die hard Red Sox fan.
My grandfather took my mom to see Babe Ruth at the very twilight of his playing career for the Boston Braves when they played at what would become BU's Nickerson Field. My father grew up in the west so he was a die hard St. Louis Cardinal fan because for decades they were the closest team to them and their radio broadcast reached throughout the sky to fans in the midwest and west. For my mother's side of the family it was bad enough my dad was from the west and was a (gasp) Protestant, but the final infamy was that he was a Cardinals fan! The brutal "stealing" of the '46 World Series by the Cardinals over the Red Sox because Johnny Pesky held onto a relay throw from the outfield before firing to the plate a fraction too late to stop Enos Slaughter's mad dash from first base would be a millstone gladly carried by my father until his death. It actually gave him joy to upset all of the Southie clan of "mackeral snappers", as the Irish Catholics soldiers were nicknamed during WWII. It only got worse after Bob Gibson's Cardinals almost single handedly beat the Red Sox again in the "Impossible Dream" season World Series of 1967. I still remember the relish with which he taunted his South Boston tormentors after every strikeout thrown by Bob Gibson during that World Series.
When we lived in Dorchester we owned a triple decker and had a tenant on the third floor who worked as a national sales rep for Gilette who at the time claimed a huge protion of advertising on major League Baseball broadcast and print outlets. He was constantly on the road and stayed in the same hotels as the teams he traveled with for Gillette to make sales pitches in the Red Sox opponents home city. In addition to an avalanche of free Gillete products, most notably razor blades of all types, "Walt" would bring home baseballs and baseball bats for my brothers and myself.
One bat was a " Jimme Fox " model. It had the thick handle mentioned in the article and weighed 44 ounces. Fox definitely was a strong man with huge hands to swing that bad boy! But, he hit enough home runs with it to let me know how strong he actually was. It must have been like trying to hit a B-B with a tree trunk! At least that's the way it felt to me when I was 12 and playing in pick up games. When you made contact on a fast ball with that beast you could barely feel it at all, not even in the handle. Amazing stuff!
The next bat was very similar to what is described in the Nakona story (above). One day Walt brought home a special bat made to his specs by the HILLERICH & BRADSBY company, and produced a Louiville Slugger "Walt _ _ _ _ _" Model bat, 36" long and weighing 36 ounces, with a thin handle , but still with the knob at the handle end of the bat. (This at a time that the shaved knob handled bat made popular by Roberto Clemente of the Pirates and Frank Robinson of the Orioles was becoming popular among power hitters). It too was a beast of a bat to swing when you were 12 years old, but the power you could produce, if your hands, wrists and arms were strong enough to create good bat speed, was unreal. Again I learned the feel of hitting a baseball hard, hearing that "CRACKKK" of the bat and feeling like I was swinging through warm butter, watching the upward flight of the ball like an art student watches a Rembrandt painting in a museam. That was the single best bat I ever swung.
Problem is, the White Ash hardwood used by "H&B", which grows almost exclusively on the border of Pennsylvania and New York, is being threatened by a new species of insect.
" U. S. ash trees are now under attack from the Emerald Ash Borer an invasive insect species native to China and first detected in Michigan in 2002. While H&B's forests are not yet infested by the beetle, the area being destroyed is growing and moving closer to them. The company is making plans to utilize other woods in the event North America's ash forests are totally destroyed. "
Why mention all this? Because I am more readily able to recognize the great significance the strides Nakona has made in the past and it's growing position to capture more of the baseball and softball products market. This means a company with great growth potential to make a product which reaches into the very fabric of what makes our country what it is. "As American as mom, baseball and apple pie" is etched in minds around the world as things that represent the U.S.A. And to all Americans, it brings a warmth of pride for who we are, our character, our sense of everyman's ability to live peacefully, prosperously and simply in happiness and security. And those products are being made here, in Fall River. I can honestly say this makes me feel pride to be a resident of this City. It's a business we should value and do whatever we can to keep here and make ever more productive and growing.
With the constant threat to White Ash hardwoods, Nakona's use of maple hardwood to produce 95% (after removal of their bad white ash stock) places them in the forefront of reliable bats for professional baseball use. Also, the lathing, almost high-tech, method of fast bat prodcution is a godsend for customers who have specific requirements in a product they need for immediate delivery. I'm sure major league customers like David Ortiz, Miguel Tejada and Vladimir Guerrero can make a quick phone call from the dugout to Nakona and have another dozen bats delivered the next day if required. That would have been unthinkable even 15 years ago.
So you have a growing company positioned with superior raw materials to make professional quality equipment on a moments notice competeing for a specific sub market against an established firm (H&B) whose own dwindling raw materials are subject to a growing and alarming failure rate with a laborious and slow production cycle when compared to it's younger, more nimble competitor. Yes, things look good for Nakona. And because of that, things look good for Fall River as well.Don't forget the same company produces baseball and softball gloves with a plant in Worcester, MA, gloves which are widely used by Major Leaguers. It's a true MA success story in which we here in Fall River play a leading role. We should feel good about it! We've hitched ourselves to a winner!
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