10 minute read
Good Wood
Nashua company embraces the rich legacy of wooden baseball bats
BY BRION O’CONNOR
PHOTOS BY KRISTIN HARDWICK PHOTOGRAPHY
Red Sox legend Ted Williams is and will always be “The Splendid Splinter.” But, if you look at baseball in its totality, the nickname “Splendid Splinter” could easily be applied to the game’s most treasured instrument — the wooden bat.
“There’s a romanticism that surrounds baseball, and especially with wood bats,” says Patrick Harvey, sales director for WH Bagshaw. “Wooden baseball bats represent the timeless tradition of the game.”
Situated in a 130-year-old, 100,000square-foot mill building alongside the Nashua River, the Walter Bat Company is doing its part to keep the legacy of the wooden bat alive. The bat company is a subsidiary of WH Bagshaw, a CNC (computer numerical control) manufacturing firm owned by Adria and Aaron Bagshaw of Amherst.
In 1870, Aaron Bagshaw’s great-great-grandfather, Walter Henry Bagshaw, launched his pin company in Lowell, Massachusetts. The distinctive “Walter” logo of the bat company is Walter Bagshaw’s actual signature from his 1878 naturalization papers.
“We’ve been (in Nashua) since 1949,” Adria Bagshaw says. “So we’re celebrating 75 years in this location.”
Walter Bat is a fairly new addition to the Bagshaw family of companies, the result of two serendipitous moments. The first was WH Bagshaw’s acquisition of Minnesota Ice Picks. The Bagshaws were fabricating the blades for the picks, while a Maine company produced the handles. When the previous owner offered to sell, the Bagshaws brought the entire operation in-house. Minnesota Ice Picks now produces three styles of wooden-handled ice picks and an ice chipper.
“It provided some different work for our employees, something identifiable for them instead of explaining that we make components that go into assemblies for airplanes and medical devices,” Adria says. “Having something that was direct-to-consumer felt good. And it was a very similar manufacturing flow.”
The second instance of good fortune came when Aaron and the couple’s son, Kyan, a promising baseball prospect, visited his pitching coach, Ariel Ramos, in Manchester several years ago.
“Ariel had this bat business in his garage,” Aaron says. “He had a lathe set up and a little painting booth, a label section, engraving, the whole thing. And he just wanted to get out of that. He wanted to focus on coaching.
“We had a conversation,” he says. “We have a lot of space here in our mill here in Nashua, and it just seemed like a very unique opportunity for us to do something completely different.”
The couple moved quickly to acquire the bat business. Perhaps too quickly. While the wooden handles for Minnesota Ice Picks are limited in size and shape, the permutations of a baseball bat can number “in the thousands,” Adria says. That meant a much more complicated undertaking.
“(Ramos) had orders that needed to be fulfilled for that spring,” Adria says. “So, we had to build the plane mid-flight. Had we really stopped and researched, I don’t know if we would have done it.
“We thought, like the ice picks, we’ll just stock a bunch of bats and sell them,” she says. “We’re great at marketing. We didn’t realize the variation, that there are different types of wood and different grades of wood. Then there are different models, different weights, different lengths.”
The Bagshaws settled on a name — Walter Bat Company, after Walter H. Bagshaw — and a logo. But creating bats from raw billets, or dowels, was another matter.
“Before I made my first bat, I pretty much thought a wood bat is just a piece of wood. Oh, how I was wrong,” says Harvey, who also previously served as the company’s operations manager. “There are various aspects to craft the highest quality wood bat. It starts with the quality of the billet. The straighter the grain throughout the length of the bat, the stronger the bat. We use hand-split billets, which ensures our bats have the straightest grain, increasing durability.”
Sourcing quality wood within the correct weight range is essential, but challenging.
“Since wood is a natural material, it’s far less predictable in its makeup than metal or aluminum,” says Greg Sopper, Walter Bat Company’s coordinator. “Although we know we need to cut a billet that weighs a certain amount to make a bat that comes out to be a certain weight for a certain model, it’s no way an exact science.
“Aside from their length and diameter, the billets are not uniform in any sense,” says Sopper. “Even within a single billet, there can be parts of it that are denser than others, which can ultimately impact the final weight of a bat.”
Precision lathe work is critical. “A seasoned hitter can actually feel the difference in the handle of a certain model that’s (a fraction) too thick or thin,” says Harvey. “Therefore, we constantly measure the diameter dimensions at various spots along the bat during the sanding process to maintain strict tolerances.”
Just like baseball players come in all shapes and sizes, so do their bats. According to Harvey, Walter Bat has “11 main adult models and two main youth models that we offer on our website. These are the crowd pleasers.” Adult models range in length from 31 to 34 inches, including half-inch increments, while youth models range from 26 to 31 inches (no half sizes.)
Customers can also tailor their twig to their own specifications.
“I’ve made over 300 custom, one-off designs,” Harvey says. “Some are unique cuts designed solely for specific high-level athletes. And some are designs I made for customers, where I took the handle and knob from one model and married it to the barrel of a different model, creating a new Frankenstein model.”
Walter Bats are made from maple, yellow birch or ash. All have different characteristics.
“Maple is the most dense, hard and stiff,” Harvey says. “Ash is the softest, so it’s very ‘whippy,’ which sends the ball when struck correctly. And birch lies in the middle, closer to maple in density but a little softer so it has a bit of flex to it. A customer can choose which species of wood based on their preference.”
The “customer” is another challenge. Walter Bat competes in a world full of aluminum and composite alternatives. Those bats rarely break, and offer more pop. Though most professional leagues still require wood bats, the licensing demands of Major League Baseball were too onerous for a startup company.
“We knew that MLB wasn’t an option out of the gates,” Aaron says. “We, as owners, said, ‘We’re not chasing that.’
“We’ve had some very good niche successes,” he says. “It really comes down to word of mouth. It comes down to creating a quality product. If you don’t do that, you’re out of the game. Then, it’s about getting it in the hands of players. Orlando Cabrera, a 2004 Red Sox world champion, was here a couple of months ago and bought nine bats for one of his players back in Colombia.”
The Bagshaws are open to doing business with Major League Baseball and its minor-league affiliates “if it happens organically,” says Aaron, but they have enough markets to keep the project viable. Harvey reports robust growth over the past three years, including international sales. Those markets include players in high school, college, collegiate summer leagues and “futures” leagues (for those who hope to play professionally), says Aaron. There are also a number of adult leagues opting for wooden bats (see page 68).
Plus, even for players in leagues with aluminum and composite bats, the wooden bat offers a superior training tool, Harvey says.
“Wood bats provide better tactile feedback when striking the ball, which is particularly important for developing proper hitting technique and power,” he says. “Wood bats also tend to have a different balance and weight distribution compared to metal or composite bats, which can affect swing mechanics and preferences. Some players find that wood bats offer a better feel and control during the swing.”
Today, the company’s production area occupies 1,800 square feet of the building’s first floor, with a rack for the billets, a CNC lathe for cutting the billets into bats, two hand-sanding lathes, and a finishing area where bats are painted, stained, or clear-coated, labeled and laser-engraved.
Public interest in their bats, and their facility, spurred the Bagshaws to open the Walter Bat Training Center. The 20,000-square-foot gym, managed by the Bagshaws’ daughter, Maya, is set on the building’s second floor, and features three 70-foot pitching/batting tunnels, a full weight room, a large plyometrics area and a retail pro shop.
“It’s just wild,” Adria says. “You walk through an active machine shop, go upstairs and open the door, and it’s like you’re teleported. You’re just in a totally different space.
“There’s really nothing like it in the area,” she says. “We want to make sure that everyone in the area can tap into it. It’s great seeing kids that are 8, 9, 10, up to 12 years old, watching these high school and college kids, learning from them and seeing the hard work paying off.”
The community aspect of the bat company and training center, says Aaron, speaks to WH Bagshaw’s “core values.” Those include courage, family, perseverance, accountability and industriousness, he says.
“We really wanted to be community focused,” Aaron says. “That’s a big part of what we’re putting out there, bringing kids in, giving them opportunities, showing them what it’s like to be involved in a business, and giving them the opportunity to be part of the community.”
The Bagshaws also diversify their Walter Bat offerings with items such as clothing, caps, wood-handled bottle openers, and baseball-themed candles produced by Sea Love Candles of Maine, including scents like “Sticky Stuff” (an ode to pine tar) and the lavender-and-grass “Baseball Mom.”
The Walter Bat Experience is a two-hour individualized visit that includes a facility tour, a customized bat fitting with a coach that includes a batting cage session, a company T-shirt or cap, and the chance to witness the production of the participant’s own Walter Bat.
The experience, says Sopper, is “a microcosm of how much we love having direct and deeply meaningful interactions with our customers, rather than just supplying them with our products and services and sending them on their way.”
“I love the hand-crafted aspect of making wooden bats,” he says. “There have been a multitude of instances where we have even designed a new model specifically for a player based on the feel and balance. We take pride in our craftsmanship.”
Which, says Harvey, reflects the fact that there is something undeniably special about a wooden baseball bat.
“I’ve asked countless players which they remember most, their first metal bat or their first wooden bat,” he says. “Almost all of them say their wooden bat.”
For information on the Walter Bat Company, visit walterbats.com.
