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  • George SheldonMarketing the Aluminum Bat
  • George Gmelch (bio)

Although a patent for a metal baseball bat was first issued in 1924, it was nearly fifty years before one was used in a baseball game. There wasn’t much interest in developing a metal bat until the 1960s, when some companies began to look for an economical alternative due to the shrinking supply and declining quality of ash, the wood from which most baseball bats were then made. In 1970, Worth Inc., a Tennessee manufacturer of baseballs, was the first to introduce an aluminum bat, a beet-red softball bat with a rubber tip. But it was the collaboration of Easton Sports Inc. and Curley-Bates Co., both California companies, who produced a bat with a superior design and stronger grade of aluminum that first made aluminum bats popular. George Sheldon was the marketing genius behind Easton, and in this narrative he recounts the effort to sell the new aluminum bat and how it became the standard on amateur baseball fields across the globe.1

By the late sixties, wood bats had become extremely expensive and their breakage was astonishing, not just high school and college, but even the pros were breaking twice as many bats as they had years before. All wood bats were made from ash, and a lot of it was now third growth. It didn’t make any difference what brand you were using, the new ash bats just weren’t holding up. There was talk in some circles that an aluminum bat might be something that could replace wood bats.

Worth and Reynolds were the first companies to come up with a regulation-size aluminum bat, but they had problems with them denting. Even at the Little League level, and especially at the softball level, they dented. All of the early bats were heavy so as to prevent or minimize denting. It was Jim Easton of Easton Sports who first came up with a lightweight alloy that performed like a wood bat, both in weight and balance. Easton Sports was the premier producer of aluminum sports products. They made everything [End Page 170] from aluminum arrow shafts to bicycle and backpack frames to ski poles, golf shafts, and tennis rackets—all tubular aluminum products. Jim and I worked closely together. He was the engineer, and I was the marketing guy. Jim came up with an aluminum alloy that did not dent, and when he made a bat called the B5 Pro, we took it around to some university and high school teams to test it. We had the Stanford team try it out. The bat was silver with a vertical logo of long blue stripes. The players were saying, “Gee, this bat is just too thin.” Well, it wasn’t thin; in fact, it was the same size as a wood bat. The problem was the vertical logo made the bat look thinner than it really was. Once we made the logo horizontal, the kids took to the bat and liked it.

Right from the start, there was a lot of interest in the bat. There was obviously a huge savings in going to aluminum, because one dozen metal bats would do an entire team for a season. In those days, there were no TV revenues in college baseball that might have paid for the increased cost of using wood bats. I remember the Stanford kids, and that was a first-class program, were mowing the outfield grass themselves because there wasn’t enough budget to keep things going.

Another factor was the arrival of the pitching machine. Pitching machines really started to take hold about 1970, and they meant that high school and college players were getting to hit five or six times as many balls as before, and, of course, that meant a lot more bat breakage. Little League Baseball was the first organization to adopt the aluminum bat in 1971; then, in 1974, the NCAA rules committee approved it, and that opened the door to all amateur levels. Most coaches simply wanted them because of the big savings over wood.

How quickly did Easton bats catch on?

Really fast. Everyone took to...

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