By Kim J. Harmon

 

More than 150 years ago the first base ball bats were fashioned out of thick, heavy pieces of hickory by woodworkers who spent some 30 years creating the perfect piece of lumber. And the tradition continues in a small Sandy Hook woodshop where Michael Paes, 40, is turning bats on his lathe for the Newtown-Sandy Hook vintage base ball team.

What started as a hobby has become something of a business for Mr Paes, a Sandy Hook attorney. And for a baseball fan at heart with a love for the history of the game and a penchant for carpentry, crafting bats seems like a perfectly natural union.

With handcraft in his family blood (his grandfather was a gunsmith for Winchester) and free woodworking lesson at the Brookfield Craft Center (a Christmas gift from his wife), Mr Paes – who never saw a lathe before last December – starting turning baseball (that is, modern baseball) bats.

“I’ve been doing carpentry my whole life,” said Mr Paes, “and as for baseball, I’ve always been a bit of historian.”

Which is why he became involved in the fledgling Newtown-Sandy Hook vintage base ball (that’s right – two words) team. Ray Shaw of Newtown started organizing the team with the goal of competing in a Newtown Tercentennial exhibition game, but with the popularity of vintage base ball growing and the interest displayed by local players the Newtown-Sandy Hook squad has formulated a summer schedule and will be competing this weekend in the Glastonbury Tournament (see related story, B4).

Mr Paes ran an Over-30 baseball team for several years but age and shoulder surgery put a stop to that. Then he heard about the vintage team last year, touched base with Mr Shaw and got very interested in returning to the field.

No surprise, several members of Mr Paes’ former Newtown Bulldogs team will now be donning the uniform of the Newtown-Sandy Hooks.

“I missed playing baseball,” said Mr Paes, “and playing something people haven’t seen for 100 years is exciting. It’s a different attitude. The players are as intense as everyone else, but it is a gentleman’s game.”

But becoming a vintage base ball player means wearing vintage uniforms and using vintage equipment. Back in 1884, a woodworker and amateur ballplayer by the name of John Hillerich made a new bat out of a piece of white ash for Pete Browning, a feared slugger for Louisville in the old American Association. Now Michael Paes – primarily using ash, but also some maple – is doing the same for his teammates.

“It was an outlet for me to get more involved,” he said.

Mr Shaw loaned Mr Paes one of his vintage bats as a basic model, a template. Of course, all the ballplayers that are coming to Mr Paes for their lumber – from the Sandy Hooks to the Hartford Senators – have their own preferences on everything from the knob at the end of the bat to the type of finish used on the wood.

“This tends to be a lot more individualistic,” said Mr Paes.

After going through four different suppliers, Mr Paes gets his lumber from a company in Pennsylvania. The wood comes in based on weight (someone might want a heavier bat, someone might want a lighter bat) and once Mr Paes gets it on the lathe it takes about 45 minutes to turn it, sand it, and hand finish it.

“It’s very interesting to see the (vintage) equipment,” said Mr Paes. “I’ve always been fascinated by the history of the game and this is like living history.”

Bulldog Bats started out as a lark, but it has become a passion for Mr Paes. And while he makes a lot of vintage base ball bats, he is also making bats for youth players – thus getting in touch with the game at its very inception as well as its newest age.

“Things are coming full circle,” he said.

Evolution Of The Bat

During the early years of base ball, each player was responsible for supplying his own bat and, as such, there were no real restrictions on length or width … or even weight. It came down to whatever piece of lumber a player could comfortably wield at the plate.

Of course, it became obvious to players in the 1850s that the biggest bat had the largest hitting surface.

But in 1859, the Professional National Association of Base Ball Players governing committee created the first restrictions on bat size – limiting a bat to two-and-a-half inches in diameter. Length was not restricted until 1869 and, then, the limit was set at 43 inches.

More than 130 years later, that’s the way it stands.

Edd Roush – who played for the Chicago White Sox, New York Giants and Cincinnati Reds – used a 46-ounce bat during his career and claimed to have never broken a bat (and just how someone would break a 46-ounce bat is up for debate).