A Small Change Can Make a Big Difference

Sometime ago, I talked Meg into visiting the Louisville Slugger Museum during a visit to her new hometown. For the uninitiated, Louisville Slugger has been the premier producer of major league baseball bats since the turn of the last century. The Hillerich and Bradsby Company (parent company of Louisville Slugger), in the days before aluminum bats, made almost all of the wooden bats that boys of my generation used. Although 95% of bats today are metal, the Louisville Slugger factory continues to turn out 8,000 bats per week from the Northern Ash billets which arrive each Monday morning from a lumber mill in Pennsylvania.

Because the major leagues are the only “purists” still using wooden bats, they are the main customer (along with collectors) for this former booming business. Perhaps the most intriguing thing I learned in the tour of the factory was that almost all bats before 1935 weighed 38 ounces or more. A 38-ounce bat is heavy and close to what Babe Ruth used when he hit 60 homers for the Yankees back in 1927.

But it all began to change in 1935 when a brash young hitter made his first trip to Louisville and ordered bats weighing only 32 ounces. This kid had figured out something that had escaped the minds and calculations of all the major leaguers up until that time. He had determined that it was bat speed and not bat mass that was the most important variable in being able to hit a baseball long and true. Now most major leaguers use bats that weigh 32 ounces or less. Alex Rodriquez, the highest-paid player in baseball today, uses a 31-ounce bat that has a scoop of wood removed from its top, thus making it weigh in at 30 ounces.

Everybody today who swings a bat owes the kid from 1935 a lot. He had the courage to challenge the prevailing paradigm and try something new. Maybe there’s something for us to learn from him as well. Sometimes a seemingly small change can make a big different whether it is in our personal lives or in the life of the church. It just takes the vision and courage to step out in faith with our Lord.

Oh, the kid from 1935? Why, Ted Williams, of course, the greatest hitter in the history of our national pastime!