Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory (The implication of baseball bats for organizational leadership)

If you’re Number One, a good way to guarantee that you won’t stay there is to continue doing exactly what you’ve been doing. Even if you do it even better than you have been, the world around you will change.

That became a key philosophy of mine when I was in positions of leadership in a couple of exceptionally strong organizations. But while I was applying it to space science organizations, my favorite example comes from baseball. Specifically, it’s the story of the Louisville Slugger.

Many baseball fans know some version of the link between the Pete Browning, nicknamed the Louisville Slugger, and the company in Louisville that ultimately trademarked that name for what became the dominant bat through the 20^th Century. I’ll explain why that is a perfect illustration of success in changing times, but the story is more complicated than I had known, including a classic story than may be more dramatic than what happened, a somewhat-embarrassing incident of telling a story to a stranger who turned out to be a great-grandson of the protagonist, and a slightly sad sequel that may illustrate the same concept.

We toured the Louisville Slugger Museum and Bat Factory today. I enjoyed the tour, seeing famous bats like one that Babe Ruth had etched notches into for the first 21 home runs of his record-setting 60 of the 1927 season before it broke, and bats used by famous players from the early 1900s to the present. But it’s the history of the company that I really like.

First, the basic story. Pete Browning was a star in the 1880s, the very early days of major league baseball, playing for his hometown Louisville entry in the American Association (yes, there was a league called the American Association that was a major league, and yes, Louisville has had major league teams for about 20 years, mostly before 1900 and a short stint in the Negro Leagues in the 1930s). In those days, bats were precious, and Browning wanted a new one, either because he was in a slump, or because he had broken his. So he went to John F. Hillerich’s woodworking shop in Louisville, and the owner’s 17-year-old baseball fan son, Bud Hillerich, made Browning a new bat.

Browning liked the bat, and other players began coming to the Hillerich shop for bats, but that caused a family problem. The shop made most of their money on things like butter churn handles, and J.F. didn’t want to be messing with a fad like the new sport of professional baseball. But Bud persisted, and when he took over the company in the 1890s, he trademarked the name Louisville Slugger. A few years later he got an endorsement deal – I’ve seen it referred to as the first sports endorsement deal – with Honus Wagner, the best player in baseball in the first decade of the 1900s. Louisville Slugger achieved such a dominance in the bat market that Hall of Famer Paul Molitor was quoted as saying that “part of the excitement of signing your first pro contract was getting a bat deal with Louisville Slugger." Even today, many major leaguers use H&B bats – they were making a batch for one of our favorite players, leading Rookie of the Year candidate Corbin Carroll, while we were there.

Bud Hillerich’s pursuit of the baseball market is fascinating to me. While the butter churn market was still strong for a few more decades, I don’t think many are sold now. But H&B has sold 200 million bats (according to the factory tour), and Louisville Sluggers are still a significant fraction of the $287M baseball bat market. Was Bud brilliant, or just lucky? I don’t know, but he did the right thing, and I can’t stop thinking about it. There aren’t very many companies from the 19^th century that are still in business today.

But part of this story is about how things change, and the company has continued to change. The company became Hillerich & Bradsby (H&B) in the early 1900s, recognizing a marketing expert who greatly expanded the company’s reach, and after Bradsby died and the Hillerich family bought out his shares from his heirs, they kept the name. H&B expanded into hockey and golf equipment, and into other aspects of baseball (e.g., batting gloves). They also made rifle stocks during World War II. The latest episode is a little sad. In 2015, H&B sold the Louisville Slugger division to Wilson Sporting Goods (which is a division of a multinational company), so after almost 150 years as a family-owned business, it no longer has full control of its fate. However, H&B continues to make bats (still marketed as Louisville Slugger, though through Wilson), and also operates the popular museum. Again, though, I think it represents recognizing a changing world.

Finally, I feel a small personal connection with H&B. Besides having owned a few Louisville Slugger baseball and softball bats, I had a fascinating conversation at a minor league game in Tucson in the mid-2000s. It was during the era when Kerry was doing the non-sports medicine for the Colorado Rockies during Spring Training, and could get tickets whenever she wanted. One sunny March day, I took the afternoon off work, and went to see the Rockies play. I got there a little late, and there had already been a run or two scored. My seats were next to a couple of guys who were clearly watching the game very intently, so I asked them what had happened, and they didn’t know, which really surprised me. But then I realized that what they were watching so intently was which player was using what brand of bat. I asked about that, and they confirmed that they worked for H&B.

One of them asked if I knew the story of H&B, and I told some version of the Pete Browning story. At the time, I didn’t know much about how H&B worked, so it wasn’t until an inning or two later than I discovered that I had just told the story of John A. “Bud” Hillerich to one of his descendants (today’s museum tour guide said that there are at least five Hillerichs in the company today). Like many of the Hillerichs, he’s had many roles in the company. I really enjoyed the conversation, both about baseball bats and about life. For example, he explained that while he loved baseball, he’d never been particularly good at it. But he was always popular in neighborhood pickup games, because he had the best bats.

One postscript to all of this. I was curious about the real story of Pete Browning and Bud Hillerich and the original bat. The best-researched impartial biography of Browning that I can find says that there are no contemporary accounts of the story, which only became popular later as the company grew. So what’s the real story? I’m not sure it matters, because this is one of those stories that is so good that it ought to be true, whether it is or not.