Making Baseball Bats a Big Seller

The day could not have gone any better for Pagan, who is trying to win a job in the starting lineup, and for Mike Gregory, the vice president for sales at BWP Bats, a boutique bat maker in Brookville, Pa. Gregory was in the Mets’ clubhouse in Port St. Lucie, Fla., that morning and gently persuaded Pagan to try one of his maple bats, even though Pagan uses bats from a rival company, Verdero.

“It’s only once, but I’ll have to keep seeing how it feels,” Pagan said after the game.

In the quirky world of wooden bats, Pagan’s game-ending home run was a huge endorsement. Major leaguers are on television often and widely imitated, so bat makers are desperate to get their wares in their hands. Yet many players are also superstitious and resist changing their equipment, bats included.

Louisville Slugger, which controls about half the market for wooden bats and is synonymous with the product, has little trouble finding buyers, including stars like Derek Jeter. But for BWP, which makes 35,000 bats a year and has been around for only a decade, every player counts.

Justin Morneau of the Minnesota Twins and Johnny Damon of the Detroit Tigers are the best known of the 150 or so minor and major leaguers who use BWP. The company also supplies bats to many of the minor league affiliates of 10 major league clubs, including the Mets and the Yankees. But with about 30 companies approved to sell to major league teams, the competition is stiff.

“The challenge for all of us is to get the business to grow,” said Gregory, who travels most of the season from stadium to stadium to meet players, equipment managers and coaches and to take orders and requests for new models. “It’s based on service, delivery time and ability to meet their specifications.”

But BWP Bats has something few other companies do: its own forests and mills. The company is a subsidiary of Brookville Wood Products, which has harvested and processed wood for the furniture industry for 44 years. A two-hour drive from Pittsburgh, the company has 5,000 acres of land that includes some of the hardest maple trees in the country.

For years, the mill also sold billets — the cylinders of wood that are turned into bats — to Louisville Slugger and other bat makers. But in the late 1990s, as BWP and other furniture makers lost ground to cheaper competitors in China, the company rethought its strategy.

BWP had laid off dozens of workers — it is down to 100 employees, from 250 at its peak — and was desperate for new revenue, so it started making its own bats. The decision was auspicious because the housing bubble later burst, sending furniture and flooring sales reeling further.

To initially get up to speed, the company’s owner, Joe Mitchell, asked Louisville Slugger to teach BWP the basics: how to choose the right wood, how to use lathes to turn the billets into bats and how to finish the bats. In the first few years, the company had trouble making bats the same way over and over, something that players demand.

“It’s one thing to know wood and another to know baseball,” Gregory said.

Indeed, to the untrained eye, all baseball bats look about the same at the outset. At the BWP Bats factory, piles of billets 37 inches long and 2 ¾inches in diameter lie stacked like cordwood. Their weight in ounces is written on one end of the billet: the heavier the billet, the denser the wood.

Bats, though, are segregated based on grain. The billets with straighter grains and heavier weights are put aside for the professionals, because those billets make for more solid bats, which can cost $85 each. The others are turned into bats for the retail market, which makes up about 80 percent of BWP Bats’ annual sales of about $4 million.

The profit margin for a bat sold to a retail outlet is about 20 percent, Gregory said, compared with 15 percent for bats sold to professionals. But the marketing value of having a pro use a BWP bat more than offsets the smaller profit.

For decades, ash was the most popular wood for bats. But once Barry Bonds in particular started using maple bats in the latter part of his career, maple became something of the wood of choice. In general, maple is a denser wood than ash, and players figure that it will give them more power when they make contact. Half of all major leaguers use maple bats, and about 80 percent of the bats that BWP makes are maple.

BWP keeps measurements for about 250 models in its computerized lathe. Each model has a different diameter from the barrel to the handle. Billets are locked into the lathe, a model is selected on the computer and, in less than two minutes, the billet is shaved according to specifications.