The barriers to entry are very real, but in a business dominated by one, giant manufacturer, Phoenix Bats—a small baseball lumber company located in mid-Ohio—looks to turn the tide.
The batter’s box is a lonely place. Baseball is a team sport, but when a hitter digs in at the plate, he is preparing himself for a split-second duel with another man some 60 feet away. Wits and confidence refined by hours upon hours in the cage are adequate weapons to be sure, but when a nasty four-seamer comes screaming towards him, a hitter’s only real friend—and most lethal weapon—is his bat. If he can’t trust his bat, then he’s already lost the battle.
When I first meet Tony Wolters, he’s in the home team’s dugout with his bat in hand. As a gentle breeze descends from a cloudless sky and rolls across Akron’s Canal Park two hours before an inauspicious mid-April AA baseball game, Wolters, a catcher for the Akron Rubber Ducks, invites me back into the bowels of the stadium to watch him take some hacks in the makeshift batting cage.1
He digs his feet into the batter’s box for practice swings. He works like a conductor with his baton in hand, making the music of every boy’s youth, that repetitive crack of bat meeting ball. Wolters is an economy of motion. He softly sets his feet and crouches into his stance, his bat so steady before the pitch that it seems nothing more than a natural extension of his hands and wrists. When he connects, the ball catapults forward. Wolters dispatches ferocious drives up the middle, one after the other. One such liner scorches straight through the net of the warmup cage.
The object with which Wolters bashes incoming baseballs is a personalized slugger from Phoenix Bats, a fledgling bat manufacturer from the middle of Ohio. He’s been a faithful customer and thus a spokesperson of sorts for Phoenix. The relationship between Wolters and Phoenix makes perfect sense, seeing as both he and the batmaker face similar and significant challenges to making a notable imprint on baseball’s biggest stage. The baseball lumber market belongs to Louisville Slugger, a company with almost 60 percent of the Major League Baseball market share. But Seth Cramer, Phoenix’s co-owner, wants in; he wants to compete with Louisville’s mass-production business model with a vastly different approach and an unparalleled commitment to custom lumber.
Phoenix launched in 1996, founded by Charley Trudeau, with the goal of producing wooden bats for a vintage baseball team which played at the Ohio Historical Society. Those bats look nothing like the sleek, shiny version Wolters brandishes—the vintage handle is almost as thick as a modern bat’s barrel. Phoenix’s founder, who ran the company out of a garage, never intended to design lumber for pro ball players, but things changed in 1999 when a prospect in the Milwaukee Brewers organization reached out after he heard about the vintage bats on an electronic bulletin board. Cramer designed a bat for him and thus initiated a clear turning point in the company’s history, which led him to seek “pro certification”—a fancy way of saying Major League Baseball approval—in 2000 for Phoenix.
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Louisville Slugger owns its own forest. It can afford to waste some wood. Every tree and every piece of wood eventually turns into a bat, regardless of the wood’s density or grain. Go in to a sporting goods store and you will find Louisville wood bats. But look closely and you’ll see wavy grains, which often indicates poor production quality. Phoenix, meanwhile, buys their wood from individual lumber mills where Cramer is often on a first-name basis with owners and operators.
When I join Cramer at the Phoenix headquarters in Plain City, Ohio, just northwest of Columbus, he schools me on the particulars of the wood Phoenix chooses for each customer. Phoenix makes personalized designs for big leaguers, minor league guys such as Wolters, and even high schoolers. The brand endeavors to put equal effort into each of these bats, to arm all levels of hitters with a superior product made to their specifications and a wood type best suited for their swing.
Phoenix affords each customer a choice of maple, ash or birch wood. Maple is the strongest wood with very little flexibility or give. Most professionals use it for its hardness and tight grain structure. Maple provides the hitter with the most power. “It’s simple physics,” Cramer says. “A harder bat transfers more energy to the ball.” Phoenix’s ash bats are very grainy, have a high concentration of moisture and are more flexible with more give. If a batter tends to mishit a ball off the end of the bat, ash, with its larger “sweet spot,” is good because it won’t easily break. That durability comes with a consequence, however, as ash carries less in the way of grain-structured pop. The outcome, be it with maple, ash or birch, is oftentimes better when the hitter makes contact with the logo facing the sky, striking the ball with the part of the barrel where the grains stack. Who knew so much thought went into producing a modern-day club?
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The professional bat industry isn’t exactly geared to help Phoenix or any up-and-comer—the minor leaguers, financially speaking—to succeed. Without paying a hefty fee to the Commissioner’s office, Phoenix would not be able to sell bats to pro players. Cramer often questions if the fee is worth it. All MLB bats must be pro-approved, but not all pro-approved manufacturers play by the same rules. As I listen to Cramer recite the league’s policies, it’s safe to say they border on ridiculous. For example, Phoenix cannot reference the terms “Major League Baseball” or “MLB,” whereas Louisville Slugger can because it pays to be the official bat of MLB. Phoenix can refer to team nicknames but never the city and team name in consecutive order. What about whiting out the logos on their website? Also not allowed as MLB owns the color combinations2.
The MLB office favors Louisville Slugger, it seems, but you wonder if players would rather the league endorse, or at least give light to Phoenix. Roughly five years ago, Cramer watched an MLB player—not a household name, mind you—swing a Louisville Slugger with Justin Morneau’s name on it. Cramer asked the guy why he didn’t have his own bats, and he said the only way he would get a quality bat from Louisville Slugger was if Morneau ordered it for him.
For as much as MLB regulations make it tough for Cramer to put Ohio-made bats on the map, his own decisions might appear, under scrutiny, to do the business no favors. Some might say he pulls his company in conflicting directions. He wants Phoenix to infiltrate the MLB, yet he’s busy giving high school hitters the big league treatment. He’s dogmatic that Phoenix’s quality and meticulous specs will drive its growth, and he insists his dedication to lesser-known customers won’t change if Phoenix grows. “Bottom line, no matter who the customer is, if the wood isn’t up to snuff, Phoenix will turn it into a trophy bat and never sell it to any competitive player.”
At this point in the game, roughly 125 professional players—both major and minor leaguers—swing Phoenix timber. During his Triple Crown year, Miguel Cabrera ordered four dozen bats from Cramer. But if there’s an example of Phoenix’s ethic— its fairness to the little guy—meeting some good karma and paying off, it’s in the story of Adam Eaton.
Eaton is an Ohio guy. He grew up in Springfield and played high school ball there before he graduated on to college ball at Miami University in Oxford. Drafted by the Arizona Diamondbacks in the 19th round of baseball’s 2010 amateur draft, Eaton now starts in center field for the Chicago White Sox. He was introduced to Phoenix in high school by word of mouth when the company started to make bats for a wider range of people. It was special to him that he could show off a custom bat to his buddies and teammates. He carried it to Miami and, in a sense, evangelized to his teammates about the product.
When Arizona drafted Eaton, his agent— another Ohio guy—encouraged him to, as he puts it, “keep swinging Phoenix.” He visited the Columbus-area factory and has gone back every year since. As a rookie, Eaton stopped by the headquarters to find Cramer and his team had been hard at work on his personalized timber. “I got there, and they had already made a model just for me—a C243 head with a fungo handle that I sent to them, so it was a bat with a really skinny handle but still very well balanced,” Eaton says. “It’s about 33-and-a-half inches long and weighs 31 ounces and some change, exactly how I wanted it. I was beyond grateful.”
(At this point, Eaton goes into a casual explanation of his bats that fascinates me and illustrates the infinite chasm of particularity between a major league hitter and, well, the rest of us. Much like he would explain for Cramer, Eaton details the process of how he separates his bats between game-ready bats and batting practice bats. Game-ready bats, he says, make a “ding” when he taps his helmet with them, indicating a bat with higher density, whereas practice bats make more of a “dong” sound, which means the wood isn’t as hard, so he knows not to use that batch in a game situation. He picks a certain bat depending on his strength that day. If he’s feeling strong, he might swing a 31.4-ounce bat, but if he’s feeling less strong, he can opt for a 31.1-ounce bat — because, you know, those three tenths of an ounce make all the difference.)
Eaton calls his relationship with Phoenix symbiotic. Cramer can get him a nice piece of custom lumber on a week’s notice, and Eaton can tout the company to a teammate or some guy in the bleachers of a White Sox game. If he had his way, Ohio, not Kentucky, would become the hub of baseball’s lumber. “It’s a combination of the high quality product and the people at Phoenix,” Eaton says. “I’ve known the owners for a long time. And look, I love the feel of the bat.”
Maybe Cramer and his company are currently much like Wolters—pining to make it big, fighting the odds and invisible pressures that keep one from reaching the majors. But Eaton is the players whose story rewards Cramer’s wild vision—a utopia of lumber equality for players of all ages—and who sits where Cramer most wants to be. Eaton, like Phoenix, he has thrived in the underdog role, a parallel not lost on him. “I love the small town, underdog angle of Phoenix Bats,” Eaton explains. “I’m only 5-foot-8, so people always said I was too short, too small, and yet I made it to the big leagues. I was an underdog too.”
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Author: Jeff Kasler | Editor: Paul Glavic | Copy Editor, Producer: Scott Sargent | Images: AP, Phoenix Bats
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Footnotes:
- Plucked by the Indians’ in the third round of the 2010 draft, Wolters was originally a middle infielder but, stuck behind super prospect Francisco Lindor, he switched positions and is now the starting catcher for the RubberDucks.
- As if that’s not enough, there’s this gem: “If you have noticed, in recent years, pro players swing pink bats on Mother’s Day,” says Cramer. “Well, last year, all pro-approved bat manufacturers except Louisville were told by MLB that we couldn’t put our company logos on the pink Mother’s Day bats. And we were also told that our pink bat profits had to be directed to a specific charity.”