Custom-crafted sticks of wood have Birdman Bats swinging in the big leagues

STORY BY JOHN METCALFE PHOTOS BY DAI SUGANO

You know you’ve reached the big leagues when Yasiel Puig licks your bat.

“He used them in the (2018) World Series and got an RBI hit, and that was a watershed moment for us,” says Cody Silveria, the bat maker for Birdman Bats, of the former Dodgers All-Star. “We felt like we made it. And he was licking his bats all the time — he’s famous for licking bats, you can look it up. He’s a strange cat, but it helps with the brand.”

For all you golfers out there, Birdman Bats makes bespoke baseball bats in its Redwood City warehouse. What started as a hobby among a bunch of baseball enthusiasts has gone on to pollinate the highest levels of the sport.

Professional players who have swung Birdman wood include Pablo Sandoval, Manny Ramirez, Ozzie Albies and Austin Slater.

“They came by in spring training in 2020, before the pandemic, and handed me a couple of samples. I tried them and just really liked them,” says Slater, an outfielder with the San Francisco Giants. “I had been thinking about switching to birch — I had swung ash before — and I really liked the model they gave me and the way the ball came o the bat with their birch and their matte finish. You could talk to a lot of baseball players, and if you find success with a bat, you tend to stick with it.”

Birdman owes its origins to a youthful fascination with baseball.

“I had made a few bats in high school — I grew up in Half Moon Bay — so I just made bats on a lathe for fun, like, glued three pieces of terrible wood together and chiseled them out,” says Silveria. “I was always drawn to wood as a kid. Even for my science-fair project I decided which type of wood absorbs the most water and why.”

Silveria met up with one of Birdman Bats’ founders, Gary Malec, when they were both playing baseball for the City College of San Francisco. Malec also happened to be making his own bats.

“Gary was making them by hand back then,” Silveria says. “I was proud of the first couple of Birdmans he made. If you had a bad day, and you knew you needed to hit, you always grabbed that lucky piece of lumber.

“They resembled logs with knobs on them, but they were still lucky, and they had a nice, thunderous crack when you hit with them.”

At the time, Malec had just quit law school.

“I wanted to be a player agent. I thought that would be a really awesome gig,” he says. “But when I went to law school, it just continuously showed it was not for me. It was just so expensive. They had debt-relief seminars at law school on how to cope with all the debt you’re taking on just going to school. That was really weird to me — it was a big alarm.”

What did his parents think of their son giving up on his legal ambitions?

“I went on a ride with my mom, and I told her, and I went on a ride with my dad and told him. So I told them separately,” he says. “I was so scared. But honestly, they were way more supportive than I thought they’d be. They were like, ‘If it’s not for you, it’s not for you.’”

Malec fell back on his passion for making stu

“I’m very mechanical, so I’ve been building things since I was little. I built my first frame-up car, motor and everything, when I was a sophomore in high school. It was a 1984 Jeep CJ7.”

He had no training in woodworking but started chiseling bats as a hobby. He gave them to coaches and people on the city college’s baseball team and made a friend in Lars Anderson, a Bay Area native who played for the Red Sox from 2010 to 2012.

“(Malec) wears a lot of hats and is a pretty impressively capable guy,” says Anderson. “I remember just destroying my computer in Japan (while playing for the Kochi the end of the season, he had this big horde for me.” it, it back to him, and he fixed it. There’s a lot of knowledge in that guy’s brain.”

The Birdman team studied these bats to refine their own model. Bat manufacturers tend to get all their wood from the same mills. Birdman takes pains to pick choice lumber and doesn’t saw the wood. Instead, the company splits it with a hydraulic ax, which preserves the grain.

“One of the factors that’s important to the durability of bats is the slope of grain, and that’s the orientation of the way the tree grew in comparison to the way the bat is produced from the wood,” says Patrick Drane, assistant director of the Baseball Research Center at UMass Lowell.

“There’s a lot of di erent processes used for cutting the billets (unfinished blanks) and turning the bats out of those billets. But a splitting of the wood tends to help align the orientation of that slope of grain with the length of the bat,” says Drane. (For folks wondering, the center conducts all sorts of baseball-related experiments involving high-powered air cannons that generate collisions between balls and bats, walls and helmets. “It is fun,” he says.)

The bats then get sanded down. They don’t have serial numbers; instead, they get “born-on” dates so you can track their lifespan.

Malec tasked Anderson, now a co-owner of Birdman Bats, with using his connections to get bats into the hands of professional players.

“Having been involved in the game for so long, that just opens up a lot of doors,” Anderson says. “Baseball is kind of insular, but once you’re in, it’s definitely a family.”

He also had him conduct some industrial research.

“There are no books on how to do this,” Malec says. “And other bat makers aren’t going to openly help you, because then you’re stealing their business. It’s a cutthroat industry.”

Instead, he suggested that anytime Anderson, then playing in the minor leagues with the Dodgers, saw a broken bat, he should grab it: “Collect every model you can find, from every company. At

Malec has bats with 2017 dates that he’s consistently used and are still performing well. A bevy of customizations is sometimes added, such as special color schemes, personalized engravings and the Birdman logo, which is based on a goofy drawing Malec’s younger brother made in art school.

“All these companies are, like, someone’s last name slapped on a piece of wood. That doesn’t make me feel much,” says Malec. “Ours are supposed to make you feel like you did when you were a kid, with this youthful, fun-spirited energy.”

Anderson says, “You can see how they’re not mass-produced on some machine. It’s cool — kind of this handmade, functional piece of art.”

And in case Puig and his wandering tongue come along, rest assured the bats are protected.

“The bats are definitely not water-submersible,” Anderson says. “They are, however, waterproof, due to the coating they have on them.”