Louisville is a historic town right on the Ohio River. It became an important center for trade, commerce and expansion to the wild Wild West. Bearing the exposition of 1883, the first electric light was illuminated here in St. James in Belle Grandia Court.

In the 21st century, it is still prospering on historic Main Street downtown, so to the Blueville slugger bat.

Male: Babe Ruth actually hit 21 home runs with this particular bat in 1927, the year that he hit 60 home runs and drove in 164 runs during that season. So this is a real piece of history. And you can see that it has a pretty good crack in it and he hit 21 home runs with this bat until he broke it. Babe Ruth used to carve a notch around the oval for every home run he would hit with that bat. So it just goes to show you how important hitting home runs really was to Babe Ruth.

These are the pillars of Northern White Ash. Once the tree is felled, it’s cut into bulks of 39 x 40 inches long. They are kiln dried with just the right temperature and the right weight and the right moisture and then they are ready to be turned into Louisville Slugger that hopefully will hit a homerun for somebody and make it to a baseball card.

This is the area where we make our composites. Basically, what they do is take the bat and they dip it on a resin. And these bats cannot be used in major league or professional competition but they are used in batting practice. It makes it a little more durable, they don’t break quite as easily and make them last a little longer.

When they bat in a particular game, you’ll se a guy come up with a natural color bat, and then if you didn’t get a hit, maybe the next time he comes up, he’s coming up with a black one or a brown or a reddish finish, they’ll try anything to try to get a hit. You know, baseball is extremely a superstitious sport.

They actually make around a million wood bats for a year and about 200,000 of those are made for professional baseball.