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NOW FOR YOUR VIEWING PLEASURE…

VINTAGE LOUISVILLE SLUGGER
JOHN MAYBERRY JR

GENUINE K44

TEMPERED (WATCH YOUR TEMPER)

BASEBALL BAT

34 INCHES

2 POUNDS

SHOWS AGE WEAR

AND ACTIVITIES BESIDES JUST BATTING BALLS

GREAT WALL HANGER / MAN CAVE / HOME DECOR

+++PLUS+++

SPALDING

OFFICIAL LEAGUE BALL

LEATHER COVER

USED IN GOOD CONDITION

c.1980 +/-

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FYI

Hillerich & Bradsby Company (H&B) is an American manufacturing company located in Louisville, Kentucky, that produces baseball bats for Wilson Sporting Goods, which commercializes them under the "Louisville Slugger" brand.

The company also operates the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory in downtown Louisville, and produces gloves for sports such as golf, cycling, fitness, and gardening under the "Bionic Gloves" brand.

Until 2015, H&B owned the "Louisville Slugger" brand. In that year they sold it to Wilson, although their factory still makes the baseball bats bearing that name.

History

J. F. Hillerich opened his woodworking shop in Louisville in 1855. During the 1880s, Hillerich hired his seventeen-year-old son, John "Bud" Hillerich.

Company legend has it that Bud, who played baseball himself, slipped away from work one afternoon in 1884 to watch Louisville's major league team, the Louisville Eclipse. The team's star, Pete "Louisville Slugger" Browning, mired in a hitting slump, broke his bat. Bud invited Browning to his father's shop to hand-craft a new bat to his specifications. Browning accepted the offer, and got three hits to break out of his slump with the new bat the first day he used it. Browning told his teammates, which began a surge of professional ball players to the Hillerich woodworking shop. This story has been challenged by alternate versions of when the first bat was made, involving either Arlie Latham or Gus Weyhing.

J. F. Hillerich was uninterested in making bats. He saw the company future in stair railings, porch columns and swinging butter churns. For a brief time in the 1880s, he turned away ball players. Bud saw the potential in producing baseball bats, and the elder Hillerich eventually relented to his son.

The bats were sold under the name "Falls City Slugger" until Bud Hillerich took over his father's company in 1894, and the name "Louisville Slugger" was registered with the US Patent Office. In 1905, Honus Wagner signed a deal with the company, becoming likely the first American athlete to endorse an item of sports equipment.

Frank Bradsby, a salesman, became a partner in 1916, and the company's name changed to "The Hillerich and Bradsby Co." By 1923, H&B was selling more bats than any other bat maker in the country, and legends like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth (R-43), and Lou Gehrig were all using them. R-43 is the company model number for the bats used by Babe Ruth.

In 1916, Hillerich and Bradsby began manufacturing golf clubs, eventually creating the PowerBilt brand for the clubs. Several major golf championships were won by players using PowerBilt clubs, including the Masters Tournament in 1967, 1971, 1979, and 1987.

During World War II, the company produced wooden rifle stocks and billy clubs for the U.S. Army. In 1954, the company purchased Larimer and Norton, Inc., a Pennsylvania lumber company to ensure a supply of hardwood for their products.

In 1976, the company moved across the Ohio River, to Jeffersonville, Indiana, to take advantage of the railroad line there. In 1996, the company returned to Louisville.

21st century

In 2005, Hillerich & Bradsby sold its majority interest in its Louisville TPS hockey equipment business. TPS Hockey was acquired three years later by Sher-Wood.

In 2015, Hillerich and Bradsby sold its Louisville Slugger division to Wilson Sporting Goods, an arm of Amer Sports which itself is an arm of the Chinese company Anta Sports. Hillerich and Bradsby continues (as of 2021) to manufacture Louisville Slugger bats in its Louisville factory, but under the aegis of Wilson Sporting Goods.

Hillerich and Bradsby CEO John A. Hillerich IV said that he had wanted to keep the bat business in the family, but that the sale was made because the company no longer can compete with larger, multinational companies that have more resources. Since 2001 Louisville slugger's market share of MLB players using their bats has been on a steady decline.

In 2016, Hillerich & Bradsby sold its PowerBilt golf club division to Hilco Streambank, an arm of Hilco Global.

This left the company with its Bionic Gloves division and its ownership and operation of the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory. The factory continues (as of 2021) to manufacture bats, but only as the exclusive manufacturer for Wilson Sporting Goods, which sells them under the Louisville Slugger brand; the museum is open to the public and has various permanent and rotating exhibits, and provides factory tours.

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John Claiborn Mayberry Sr. (born February 18, 1949) is an American former Major League Baseball player who was active from 1968 to 1982 for the Houston Astros, Kansas City Royals, Toronto Blue Jays and New York Yankees. He was a two-time All Star.

High school and minor leagues

Mayberry attended Northwestern High School, graduating in 1967. He was a gifted high school athlete, playing baseball, football, and basketball at Northwestern; John was twice named to the Detroit News All-State Basketball Team. After graduation, Mayberry was selected by the Houston Astros in the first round (sixth overall) of the 1967 Major League Baseball draft. He was the second first baseman taken in the draft, Ron Blomberg having been selected number one overall by the New York Yankees.

As an 18-year-old, Mayberry was assigned to the Covington Astros of the Appalachian League. While there, he batted .252 in the 1967 season, hitting 4 home runs in 155 at-bats. He continued to develop the following season, making appearances at three different levels of minor league baseball. His batting average for the 1968 season was a robust .320, with a high of .338 in 195 at-bats for the Cocoa Astros of the Florida State League. Between three levels, Mayberry hit 23 home runs and slugged .552. He made his major league debut that season, appearing in four games, although amassed no hits. During his four-game call-up, Mayberry recalled the first time he met Hank Aaron, who was playing for the Atlanta Braves:

"'I just stood there looking at him,' Mayberry said. 'I said to myself, "so this is the Hammer, this is Henry Aaron."'"

At 20 years old, Mayberry played 123 games for the Oklahoma City 89ers of the AAA-level American Association. With 21 home runs, a .303 batting average, and a .522 slugging percentage, his power began to resemble the man he met the year before in the majors. He batted in 78 runs and scored 95, walking more times than he struck out (62/42). Mayberry's second short stint in the majors did not result in his first hit, though he did make it on base with one walk in five plate appearances. That would not come until the following year; after playing 70 games at Oklahoma City and batting .273 with 13 home runs, Mayberry was called up to the Houston Astros.Baseball is a sport played between two teams usually of nine players each. It is a bat-and-ball game in which a pitcher throws (pitches) a hard, fist-sized, leather-covered ball toward a batter on the opposing team. The batter attempts to hit the baseball with a tapered cylindrical bat, made of wood (as required in professional baseball) or a variety of other materials (as allowed in many nonprofessional games). A team scores runs only when batting, by advancing its players--primarily via hits, walks, and the opposition team's fielding errors--counterclockwise past a series of three markers called bases and touching home plate arranged at the corners of a ninety-foot square, or "diamond." The game, played without time restriction, is structured around nine segments called innings. In each inning, both teams are given the opportunity to bat and score runs; a team's half-inning ends when three outs are recorded against that team.
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Baseball on the professional, amateur, and youth levels is popular in North America, Central America, parts of South America, parts of the Caribbean, and East Asia. The modern version of the game developed in North America beginning in the eighteenth century. The consensus of historians is that it evolved from earlier bat-and-ball games, such as rounders, brought to the continent by British and Irish immigrants. By the late nineteenth century, baseball was widely recognized as the national sport of the United States. The game is sometimes referred to as hardball in contrast to the very similar game of softball.

In North America, professional Major League Baseball teams are divided into the National League (NL) and American League (AL). Each league has three divisions: East, West, and Central. Every year, the champion of Major League Baseball is determined by playoffs culminating in the World Series. Four teams make the playoffs from each league: the three regular season division winners, plus one wild card team. The wild card is the team with the best record among the non–division winners in the league. In the National League, the pitcher is required to bat, per the traditional rules. In the American League, there is a tenth player, a designated hitter, who bats for the pitcher. Each major league team has a "farm system" of minor league teams at various levels. These teams allow younger players to develop as players gain on-field experience against opponents with similar levels of skill.

The distinct evolution of baseball from among the various bat-and-ball games is difficult to trace with precision. While there has been general agreement that modern baseball is a North American development from the older game rounders, the 2006 book Baseball Before We Knew It: A Search for the Roots of the Game, by David Block, argues against that notion. Several references to "baseball" and "bat-and-ball" have been found in British and American documents of the early eighteenth century. The earliest known description is in a 1744 British publication, A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, by John Newbery. It contains a wood-cut illustration of boys playing "base-ball," showing a set-up roughly similar to the modern game, and a rhymed description of the sport. The earliest known unambiguous American discussion of "baseball" was published in a 1791 Pittsfield, Massachusetts, town bylaw that prohibited the playing of the game within 80 yards of the town's new meeting house. The English novelist Jane Austen made a reference to children playing "base-ball" on a village green in her book Northanger Abbey, which was written between 1798 and 1803 (though not published until 1818).

The first full documentation of a baseball game in North America is Dr. Adam Ford's contemporary description of a game that took place in 1838 on June 4 (Militia Muster Day) in Beachville, Ontario, Canada; this report was related in an 1886 edition of Sporting Life magazine in a letter by former St. Marys, Ontario, resident Dr. Matthew Harris. In 1845, Alexander Cartwright of New York City led the codification of an early list of rules (the so-called Knickerbocker Rules), from which today's have evolved. He had also initiated the replacement of the soft ball used in rounders with a smaller hard ball. While there are reports of Cartwright's club, the New York Knickerbockers, playing games in 1845, the game now recognized as the first in U.S. history to be officially recorded took place on June 19, 1846, in Hoboken, New Jersey, with the "New York Nine" defeating the Knickerbockers, 23–1, in four innings.

Semiprofessional baseball started in the United States in the 1860s; in 1869, the first fully professional baseball club, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, was formed and went undefeated against a schedule of semipro and amateur teams. By the following decade, American newspapers were referring to baseball as the "National Pastime" or "National Game." The first attempt at forming a "major league" was the National Association, which lasted from 1871 to 1875. The "major league" status of the NA is in dispute among present-day baseball historians, and Major League Baseball does not include the NA among the major leagues. The National League, which still exists, was founded in 1876 in response to the NA's shortcomings. Several other major leagues formed and failed, but the American League, which evolved from the minor Western League (1893) and was established in 1901 as a major league, succeeded. The two leagues were initially rivals that actively fought for the best players, often disregarding one another's contracts and engaging in bitter legal disputes. A modicum of peace was established in 1903, and the World Series was inaugurated that fall. The next year, however, the National League champion New York Giants did not participate as their manager, John McGraw, refused to recognize the major league status of the American League and its champion, the Boston Americans. The following year, McGraw relented and the Giants played the Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series.

Compared with the present day, games in the early part of the 20th century were lower scoring and pitchers were more successful. The "inside game", whose nature was to "scratch for runs", was played more violently and aggressively than it is today. Ty Cobb said of his era especially, "Baseball is something like a war!" This period, which has since become known as the "dead-ball era", ended in the 1920s with several rule changes that gave advantages to hitters and the rise of the legendary baseball player Babe Ruth, who showed the world what power hitting could produce, altering the nature of the game. Two of the changes introduced were a move to bring the outfield fences closer to the infield in the largest parks, and an introduction of extremely strict rules governing the size, shape and construction of the ball, causing it to travel farther when hit; the aggregate result of these two changes was to enable batters to hit many more home runs.

In 1884, African American Moses Walker (and, briefly, his brother Welday) had played for the Toledo Blue Stockings of the major league American Association. An injury ended Walker's major league career, and by the early 1890s, a "gentlemen's agreement" in the form of the baseball color line effectively barred African-American players from the majors and their affiliated minor leagues, resulting in the formation of several Negro Leagues. The first crack in the agreement occurred in 1946, when Jackie Robinson was signed by the National League's Brooklyn Dodgers and began playing for their minor league team in Montreal. Finally, in 1947, the major leagues' color barrier was broken when Robinson debuted with the Dodgers. Although the transformation was not instantaneous, baseball has since become fully integrated.

Major League baseball finally made it to the West Coast of the United States in 1958, when the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants relocated to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively. The first American League team on the West Coast was the Los Angeles Angels, who were founded as an expansion team in 1961.

Baseball's unique style
Baseball is unique among American sports in several ways. This uniqueness is a large part of its longstanding appeal and strong association with the American psyche. The philosopher Morris Raphael Cohen described baseball as a national religion. Many Americans believe that baseball is the ultimate combination of skill, timing, athleticism, and strategy. In this, baseball is similar to its cousin game cricket: in many Commonwealth nations, cricket and the culture surrounding it hold a similar place and affection to baseball's role in American culture.

The allure of baseball is in its subtleties: situational defense, pitch location, pitch sequence, base running, batting strategies, statistics, ballparks, history, and player personalities. It's been noted that the game itself has no time limit, and its playing surface, rather than rigidly rectangular and standardized, extends theoretically to eternity from a single point (home plate) to beyond its own fences. For the avid fan, the game—even during its slowest points—is never boring because of these nuances. Therefore, a full appreciation of baseball naturally requires some knowledge of the rules; it also requires deep observation of those endearing and enduring qualities that give baseball its unique style.
 

(PICTURE 5 & VIDEO FOR DISPLAY ONLY)

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