The Tale of the ‘Louisville Slugger’
How a Baseball Bat made in Kentucky, found its way To Chipping Norton

At some point during the 1990’s, a baseball bat was donated to the Local History Museum at Chipping Norton in rural Oxfordshire and was put away into storage for safe keeping and was forgotten about.

Not as surprising as you may think as the Cotswold town has a strong historical link with America’s national sport, having had a thriving club, (founded in 1920 by local scout leader Fred Lewis), winning the ‘unofficial British Championship’ in 1926 and 1927 and continuing to run teams until the early 1960’s.

Fast forward to the winter of 2023 when, purely by chance the bat resurfaced; it was in a state of disrepair and had obviously suffered from woodworm in the past, but it clearly showed that it was a ‘Louisville Slugger’ (LS) produced in Kentucky USA, by ‘Hillerich and Bradsby’.

I needed to find out more.

First created in 1884 by 17 year old ‘Bud’ Hillerich (the son of a woodworker), out of ash, legend has it that it was made for a local major league player, by the name of Pete Browning, who advised the young Hillerich with regards to the weight and design of the bat.

The next day Browning, who had been experiencing a ‘batting slump’, broke this with three hits from his new bat and became known as ‘The Louisville Slugger.’

In 1894, the name became their registered trade-mark and three years later Bud became a partner in the family woodworking firm, which in 1905 became the first company anywhere in the world, to use a professional player to endorse their product; Honus, ‘The Flying Dutchman’ Wagner, who had been named ‘National League Batting Champion’ five years in a row, signed a contract to allow the company to use his signature on bats sold in the stores. In 1911, businessman Frank Bradsby joined the firm and five years later the company became known as ‘Hillerich and Bradsby’(H&B).

Since Wagner, generations of baseball legends have ‘swung’ LS bats, including Roberto Clemente, Hank Aaron, Joe Dimaggio and the biggest name in baseball history, George Herman ‘Babe’ Ruth, who reputedly swung a ‘monster’ 50-ounce bat, the heaviest ever turned at the factory.

Ruth was very fond of using LS bats throughout his career and is credited with having more bats made for his personal use than any other player of the era. He was known for his prodigious power and set many records during his career, including 60 ‘home runs’ in the 1927 season. A H&B bat used by Ruth in an exhibition match in 1923 sold for $1.8 million dollars (£1.3 million) at an auction in August 2023. The bat in the museum’s possession (weighing 34 ounces) contains as part of the oval logo, the number ‘125’ which refers to the grade of the wood used; 125 being the highest quality reserved for professionals alongside the words ’Made in USA’, which places it between 1921 and 1933.

It also has the signature of a ‘Ross Youngs’, etched into the bat, who the ‘LS Museum’ in Kentucky confirmed had signed a contract with B&H in 1921 and who is sadly remembered for having had his career tragically cut short due to terminal illness; he would die of Bright’s Disease in 1927 and would be posthumously inducted into ‘The Baseball Hall of Fame’ in 1972.

 

After making contact with The LS Museum in Kentucky, which included sharing several photographs of the bat, KC Colorado (a museum representative) agreed that,

‘Based on the combination of the logo and the natural state of the bat, it’s highly possible that this bat belonged to Ross Youngs.’

So who was he?

In 1916, as a budding young player Ross Youngs’ contract was purchased by John McGraw of The New York Giants, who initially sent him to The Rochester Hustlers where Youngs achieved a season’s average, (which is a measure of a batter’s success rate in achieving a hit), of .356 in one hundred and forty matches.

In modern times, an average of more than 300 is considered to be ‘excellent’ and this  was the first of eight straight .300 seasons for Ross Youngs, who duly signed for The New York Giants in 1917 and helped them reach The World Series’( The annual final championship series in Major League Baseball in the US and Canada) four years in a row from 1921 to 1924 becoming the first player to get two hits in one inning in a World Series game in 1921.

Ross ‘Pep’ Youngs, (nicknamed due to his ‘hustle’), formed part of the group that toured Britain and Europe in 1924, in the hope of growing the sport overseas. He had married Dorothy Peinecke just one day after the World Series had ended and the newlyweds sailed to Europe for what he described as a ‘baseball honeymoon.’ Three years after the tour to Europe and despite the best care available, Ross Youngs would sadly die of a degenerative kidney disorder aged just 30.

The decision to tour Europe had been taken in 1923 when the ‘Giants’ Manager, John McGraw was holidaying in Paris, and it was at this time that he reputedly made a sizeable cash donation to British baseball.

Charlie Muirhead, founder and secretary of ‘The Anglo American Baseball Association’ (AABA), is credited for being central in inviting the teams to London  where ‘The Chicago White Sox’,  and the ‘New York Giants’ played a series of exhibition matches ,which culminated at Stamford Bridge( the home of Chelsea Football Club) on November 6^th, in front of King George V, other members of the Royal family and 7,000 fans.

However, ‘The Folkstone Baseball Chronicle’ posting in September 2023 believes that despite being exhibition matches,

‘The spirit in which these matches were played was deeply competitive and by no means a gentle run out on the park.’

Joshua Casper in ‘The Baseball Gods Meet the Divine Right of Kings’ (2020), noted that, ‘After the King departed, The White Sox royal touch ran out and The Giants added another pair of runs and won the last game of their tour in front of three kings 8-5, to cap their tour of The British Isles.’

We know that Ross Youngs took part in the match as ‘The Washington Evening Star’ reported the day after that, ‘The Giants took a 3 run lead in the first inning on doubles by Youngs, Meules and Stengel’ which begs the question, ’Did he use the bat that we now have in Chipping Norton?’

It is this match that Andrew Taylor of ‘The Folkestone Baseball Chronicle’ and a leading authority on the history of the sport in the UK, believes that the bat may have been given to someone connected with the Chipping Norton Club. Taylor believes:

One scenario, and by no means outlandish would be that this bat was a donation from the 1924 match at Stamford Bridge. A sizeable cheque plus most of their equipment from the tour was given to members of the AABA.

Taylor goes on,

The quantity of equipment donated, plus the scarcity of London teams at the time, suggests to me that some equipment may very well have found its way to Chipping Norton.

Fred Lewis the founder and driving force behind the sport in Chipping Norton and the County of Oxfordshire, who had forged strong links with Charlie Muirhead and the AABA in the early 1920’s, may well have attended this match as a guest and it is highly possible that it was Fred himself who brought the bat back to the town.

Fred was posthumously inducted into The British Baseball Hall of Fame in 2010 and is rightly admired as a true ‘baseball pioneer’ in the history of the sport in Great Britain, as his players in this rural town were entirely home grown.

‘What makes Chipping Norton Baseball Club so unique’, says Andrew Taylor, ‘Is that it adopted, learnt, played and excelled at the game, without any outside influence.’

Although many derided the tour as a failure, it did leave a legacy in Britain, as the cash and equipment donations secured the fledgling AABA into the 1930’s.

‘Then’, believes Andrew Taylor, ‘a new generation took up interest in the sport and following the establishment of ‘The National Baseball Association’ by the philanthropist John Moores  (famous for founding Littlewoods football pools and a good friend of Fred Lewis) in 1934, the ‘golden age’ of British baseball dawned.’

There was no National Governing Body for Baseball in the UK between 1912 and 1933, however in 1926, Chipping Norton were invited to Stamford Bridge to play against an ‘All Star’ team from London for what ‘The Daily Mail’ considered to be, ‘The British Championship.’

Chipping Norton duly won the match 13-12 and it is possible that the bat was used in the match by one or more of the visitors, on their way to victory and possibly used in the match the following year against St Joseph’s College from North London, which saw the Oxfordshire team win again; this victory was supposed to lead to a match against the French champions in Paris to determine who would be crowned, ‘The Champions of Europe’, but sadly there is no evidence to suggest that the match ever took place.

A series of attempts had been made by the Americans to establish baseball in the UK, between 1874 and 1924 and on four separate occasions teams from the US visited Britain putting on exhibition matches, mainly at cricket and football stadiums. However, on each occasion, the sport was given ‘short shrift’ by the British press and failed to make the impact it so desired, but it was championed by the Nobel prize winning writer George Bernard Shaw( Pygmalion, Arms and the Man, Mrs Warren’s Profession) and the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Sir Arthur Conan –Doyle. He was a strong exponent of exercise, popularising skiing and team sports and a keen cricketer.  In 1924, he published an article in The New York Times to coincide with the tour, extolling the virtues of baseball:

Doyle said:

The game would be easily adopted by any village club in England, which could construct a field that needs no special levelling and as a summer game it would no more interfere with cricket than lawn tennis has done.

Conan-Doyle’s optimism concerning the popularity of baseball proved to be unfounded and sadly the sport never achieved the national impact in Britain that he had envisaged.

Interestingly however, his vision of the sport in the UK was actually happening in Chipping Norton, where a thriving club existed due to Fred Lewis’ adoption of the sport, initially for his scouts as early as 1909 and by 1924, the club was running senior men’s, mixed and junior teams, who were involved in local leagues and exhibition matches, often attracting large crowds on Sunday afternoons at The Banbury Road Diamond.

As for the bat, we shall never know for certain if it was used by Ross Youngs at the match at Stamford Bridge one hundred years ago, but it is highly possible that it was and despite opportunities to sell the bat to a collector in the US, the decision to keep it in Chipping Norton gives out a strong message that sometimes, history is more important than financial gain and that the bat is a link to a bygone age when baseball ruled in a small town in rural England, but it is also a reminder of a match that took place in 1924 and of a player whose life was tragically cut short in its prime.

There is a permanent display of baseball memorabilia at the Chipping Norton Local History Museum with ‘The Louisville Slugger’ taking pride of place at its heart and to find out more about baseball in Chipping Norton please click on the link below:

https://www.playingpasts.co.uk/articles/team-sports/were– they the champions-the fascinating-story-of-chipping- norton-baseball-club/

 

My thanks go to Andrew Taylor, Joshua Casper, Alan Vickers and Jacob Pomrenke, for their help with this article.

Article copyright of Bill Williams