Basura: The Ogres and the use of Japanese bamboo bats

I just got back from North Carolina and my plane’s in-flight magazine had a little article on wood bats. Some guy, Joe Marucci, had a kid who wanted a wood bat. He made one for his kid, made a few more, now the Marucci Bat Co. sells to major leaguers. The mag solicits comments to any of the articles, with incentives possible. So I wrote this on a napkin. I thought readers might be interested.

To: aweditor@ink-global.com
Re: Sports, July 2016 American Way

I enjoyed reading about Joe Marucci and his baseball bats in the July 2016 American Way. He started making bats for his son, and ended up selling bats – lots of bats – to major leaguers.

Reading about bats reminded me of long gone history from my youth. In the ’70s, I played sandlot baseball with The Ogres, an organization of amateur baseball players. We all hated the way the ball sounded coming off aluminum bats, that weird ping sound that didn’t correspond with our vision (dare I say our auditory vision?) of baseball.

Wood bats provided a sharp CRACK when solid contact was made. But Louisville Sluggers broke often, and were expensive to replace.

One of our players, David Young (career path: newspaper sports reporter – sports editor – editor) proposed a solution. Japanese bats. They were formed from laminated bamboo, made into billets and lathed to various specifications. Sometimes colloquially called bambooees, they were advertised as unbreakable.

I recall the bats were named for teams, rather than players, with wonderfully evocative names like Kunuchi Fire Dragons, Tokyo Swallows, Saitama Lions, Chiba Marines, Hiroshima Carp, and Hokkaido Ham Fighters. I should note that Hokkaido team did not fight ham, but were fighters, in the athletic sense, affiliated with Hokkaido ham.

Perhaps because of my Welsh heritage, I was drawn to the fire dragons. A dragon is featured on the Welsh flag, perhaps explaining the affinity.

The ball seemed to carry about ten feet less than with a conventional bat, which could be the difference between a long fly out and a home run. But Sadaharu Oh hit his 800 plus home runs using bambooees. 800 homers. Oh my!

In the Ogre Baseball League, for a time we all played with bamboo bats. They didn’t break. Never, in our experience. Which meant they were safer, with no pieces of broken bat flying around. And far more economically advantageous, compared with replacing ash or maple bats.

And they made that good sound.