Checked Swing

He especially enjoyed turning table legs. He fashioned legs for a large department store chain in the 1990s. And balusters for custom-made staircases. "Things were going pretty good," he says. But there was one problem. "Folks weren't paying on time."

Being the kind of man who would rather turn than be turned, Randolph went knocking on opportunity's door. One day near the end of the last century, he was walking through his kitchen and saw a Delmarva Shorebirds baseball bat lying on the counter. His daughter, Arianne, had won it as student of the month. Randolph's mind started turning.

So did his lathe. "It looked pretty simple," he says. "Making the bat was the easy part."

Making the stamp for the logo was hard. "The first die I commissioned came back backwards," he says. He lost $1,600 on the deal.

He visited three post offices and several mail-it-yourself stores, testing the scales in every one to make sure his own small set of scales was aces-up accurate. He didn't even know he was following in the footsteps of the greatest-ever batter, Ted Williams, who weighed his bats at the post office.

"It took me about a year to get everything in order," Randolph says. But he began production, taking the block of wood, shaving it down for two minutes or so, sanding it, trimming the ends, dipping it in lacquer, branding it with his logo or slapping a decal on it. He talked to some guys who played baseball. They started sending him business. "I got my daughter to put me up a Web page," he says. It is http://www.talboturnings.com/ .

His small catalogue features a handful of models, with lengths pretty much running 32, 33 or 34 inches and weights varying from 31 to 33 ounces. You can choose the size of your handle and barrel (the fat part near the business end). Many bats are splitting in the major leagues, Randolph says, because players want large barrels and skinny handles.

In August 2000, Randolph felt ready for the Big Show. He wrote a letter to Major League Baseball, requesting information on how to get a bat approved for big league play. A couple of months later, a big league exec responded.

The rules were simple: An official MLB bat had to be made of one piece of wood and could not be longer than 42 inches or have a diameter of more than 2 3/4 inches. The bat could be cupped at the end, up to one inch deep. You could put anything you wanted on the bat's handle to improve the grip. The markings on the bat had to fall in certain spots. Colors had to be approved.

Over the next year, Randolph sent two batches of bats to the MLB rules committee. He received a letter in January 2002 saying that his sample bat had been approved and could be used in "professional play." Randolph was listed as one of 48 sanctioned suppliers.

He sold a dozen bats to Larry Bigbie, then of the Baltimore Orioles, he says. Other major and minor leaguers bought some bats. He sold to the Shorebirds, the Aberdeen IronBirds and the Trenton Thunder.

Virgil Chevalier, formerly of the Boston Red Sox, used a Chesapeake Thunder when he played for Trenton. "The hard maple bats," he wrote Randolph, "are by far the best performing bats that I have used."