Checked Swing

Legend has it that the first Louisville Slugger was turned in 1884 for Pete Browning, a player known as the Old Gladiator who starred on the Louisville Eclipse. Woodworker Bud Hillerich, 17, saw Browning break a bat, so he fashioned another for the slugger. Browning got three hits the next game.

More than 100 years later, a Hillerich -- John A. Hillerich IV -- is still running the company. It's a dynasty that's older than the New York Yankees. And the major league bat has remained essentially the same.

Through the decades, Louisville Sluggers have been the favorite bats of baseball players at all levels. The company says that more than 60 percent of today's major leaguers -- including Derek Jeter and Ken Griffey Jr. -- use its lumber.

Meanwhile, Mike Randolph churns out Chesapeake Thunders for adult leagues that prefer wood bats because they are more traditional and less dangerous than metal ones.

Most little leaguers, high-schoolers and collegians play with metal bats that are expensive and iridescently ugly. When bat meets ball it makes a bink! sound, like when you pop a metal garbage can lid into place or when a rock hits your oil pan.

Metal bats, says wood bat proponent Huber, "make it an unfair, unpleasant game. The sound of the ball off the bat, that crack, is something that thrills a person, so much more than the ping you get from metal."

In 2001, Huber persuaded the Washington branch of the National Adult Baseball Association -- which has 18 teams including the DC Dukes and Falls Church News Hounds -- to move from metal to wood bats.

"The game of baseball is perfectly designed," Huber says. "There is probably no other athletic game in the history of man that has remained virtually unchanged for 150 years. There is something magical about the dimensions of the game, even with larger, stronger, faster players who come along every generation. When you put metal in that situation, you screw it up."

Metal bats do add distance to hits. But the ball comes off the barrel so fast that it can be hazardous to infielders. "They're just dangerous," Huber says. And that's why he buys from Randolph.

Other grown-up leagues around the country have followed suit, and now there is a wood bat championship every July at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Some have found Talbot Turnings. "I've been keeping myself pretty busy," Randolph says. "I don't have any slack time."

He stays busy during the warm months. But since he can't make bats for the pros anymore, he doesn't see his bat business growing too much anytime soon.

He's looking for something to do the rest of the year. He points to a small, slim pair of wooden things on his work table.

He's thinking of getting into drumsticks.