Though home run hitter Barry Bonds left baseball in 2007 under a cloud of steroid suspicion (he’s technically still a free agent), the San Francisco superstar left a legacy that has been as durable as his records.
When Bonds hit a record-setting 73 round-trippers in 2001, he used a maple bat for the second half of the season. Up till then, ash was the lumber of choice. Today, Jim Anderson, founder and vice president of sales for Brooten, Minnesota–based MaxBat, estimates that between 60 and 70 percent of professional baseball players use maple bats. While Bonds never wielded a MaxBat, roughly 150 Major League Baseball players do. (Are ash bats not as good as those made of maple—a harder, denser wood? Depends on what player you ask.)
Anderson made his first bat in early 2001 for his son, Max. After his employer, a Twin Cities–area educational publisher, folded in the fall of 2001, Anderson found the idea of becoming a bat manufacturer appealing. He paid a $5,000 licensing fee to Major League Baseball and got Brooten, Minnesota–based Glacial Wood Products, one of the nation’s largest custom wood-turning facilities, to produce his bats. (MaxBat has since become a Glacial Wood Products division.) In 2002, Anderson broke into “the show” thanks to a friend who had played minor league baseball with then–San Diego Padres manager Bruce Bochy. The friend gave Bochy a MaxBat maple bat to try; Padre Mark Kotsay was the first big-leaguer to use one in a game.
MaxBat now is on a list of suppliers whose products Major League Baseball allows players to use. The company has sold $1 million worth of bats and ancillary apparel in each of the last two years and is shooting for $1.5 million this year. It now makes ash and birch bats as well as maple ones. For distribution, MaxBat relies on a few regional sporting goods dealers and several dozen single-store retailers nationwide. (Anderson hopes to add major sporting good chains.)
How does MaxBat differentiate itself from other maple bat makers? “It’s the quality of the product,” Anderson says. Players can tell a good bat from one that is not up to major league standards “based on the uniform straightness of the grain and hardness of the wood. We have some really skilled employees who take great pride in making high-performance bats.”
Last season, maple bats drew criticism after several people (fans, a coach, and an umpire) were injured by big-leaguers’ broken bats. Anderson wrote and submitted a 27-page document that contends bat breakage is due to many factors, regardless of wood type. Major League Baseball has conducted investigations into bat breakage, resulting in several new regulations for the way maple bats are produced.
