by Bret Boone
Another thing I lacked was a bat. As in every other minor league, it was wood bats only in the Carolina League. That put me at a disadvantage, because I’d never swung one in a game. From Little League right up through high school and college ball, I’d used aluminum. As you probably know, the ball springs off a metal bat with a ping you can hear half a mile away. It’s got a much bigger sweet spot, and the ball goes farther. But metal bats are illegal in the pros. They make hitting too easy. If you gave one of today’s major leaguers a metal bat from my era, the game wouldn’t be fair anymore.
So I marched to the bat rack with no idea of what I was doing. What sort of lumber did I want? A toothpick? A tree trunk? There wasn’t much time to decide, because Rhodes was striking out the two guys ahead of me.
You may be wondering why I’d go into pro ball without at least trying a wood bat. The answer: Dad’s advice. He knew I was being scouted from my first days at USC. He figured I’d look better to the scouts ripping liners than blooping bloopers. “Don’t give them a reason not to like you,” he said. It made sense at the time. Nobody could say I had a weakness—“Kid can’t hit with wood”—if I never tried it in the first place.
I’m not sure our plan worked. It sure didn’t seem to help my draft position. And now here I was at the bat rack in pro ball, reaching for…this one. No, that one. Finally I took the lightest bat in the rack. Not much heavier than balsa wood, it felt like the Easton aluminum bat I used in college. With Rhodes on the mound, I wanted to be quick.
A voice on the loudspeakers—“Now batting, Bret Boone!”
Sometimes hitting is simple. See the ball, hit the ball. Ignore the butterflies in your stomach. Rhodes wound up and…
I ripped a bullet to the gap that one-hopped the wall, and I was 1-for-1 as a pro. The fans clapped politely, but to me it sounded like a standing O. I cruised into second base with a smile so big it must have gone into short left field.
After the game the other Pilots and I rolled into our leaky locker room, looking for a postgame meal. I was starving. “Where’s the spread?”
And then I saw Tiny lug in a tin box full of hot dogs. Tiny, who weighed about 400 pounds, was the Peninsula Pilots’ clubhouse man, handyman, and you-name-it man. Most teams in the low minors have somebody like that. Tiny did laundry and sometimes filled in on the grounds crew or in the ticket booth, whatever it took to get the Pilots through the day. He even sold me his junker of a car for eight hundred dollars. One of Tiny’s duties was to dispose of all the soggy hot dogs that didn’t get sold that night. So he dumped them on a table in the middle of the locker room. He said, “There’s your spread, kid.” And my teammates dug in. The lucky ones got a bun to go with their hot dog. I was standing there thinking that A-ball was going to be a hell of challenge. Nutritionally, at least.
Fans like to think of minor-league baseball as a downsized version of the majors, but it’s not even close. As a twenty-two-year-old Peninsula Pilot I made $700 a month. Okay, $700 went further in those days, but not far enough. A Big Mac cost $2.25 in 1990. You remember that kind of thing when the paycheck you get every other Friday says Pay to the order of Obscure Minor Leaguer, $350, and has no taxes deducted because you’re well below the poverty level. My $175 a week came to a little less than $30 a game.
I bunked in a crummy condo with three teammates, eating fast food and driving the others around because I was the only one with a car. One day I drove a bunch of guys to a water park. Just being a prince of a teammate, you know? We probably left a trail of baseballs and tobacco spit on the road to the park, because the heap Tiny had sold me had a hole in the floor. The car broke down on the way back. We decided it was a lost cause, so we called a cab and left Tiny’s heap by the side of the road. Hampton, Virginia’s a sleepy enough town that it might still be there. If you ever drive through there and see a rusty junker on the side of the road, it’s mine.
We drew pretty good crowds on weekends and fireworks nights, but most nights we entertained thousands of empty seats. Sometimes there were two hundred fans in the ballpark and a million mosquitoes. I’ll admit I was spoiled by first-class college ball—flying to road games with the USC baseball team, eating room-service dinners in Hiltons. The Peninsula Pilots rode buses. We stayed at Travelodges and Motel 6s in Frederick, Maryland, and Salem, Virginia, and Durham, North Carolina. Some of the Carolina League ballparks had no visitors’ locker room, just a dugout, so we’d dress in our motel rooms and clomp through the lobby in our spikes and unis for the bus ride to the park. At home we’d hope for hot water in the showers at War Memorial Stadium, where you could trip over the athlete’s-foot fungus.
And you know what? I loved every day of it.
This was pro ball! Finally I was a professional ballplayer like Dad and Gramps, even if I was making $3.30 per inning.
Kevin Costner wasn’t around for our road trips to Durham—they’d shot his movie Bull Durham three years before—but we used to quote the movie on our team bus. “You gotta learn your clichés.” Bull Durham was funny and even realistic to a point. We had our bush-league fun like the guys in the movie. There were goofy pranks. Superstitions. Bench-clearing brawls. There were minor-league groupies in every town, girls who were crazy for ballplayers. Some of them wanted autographs, some wanted something a little more personal to remember you by. We were young, dumb, and full of, um, enthusiasm, but somehow we always made it to the ballpark the next day.
Of course I was too focused to waste much time with something as distracting as a groupie. By game time every day I wanted to get called up to the majors by the seventh-inning stretch, if not sooner.
That year with the Pilots was also the year I learned to hit a cowhide ball with a wooden bat. Dad goes back to the days when the ball’s skin was horsehide, but in 1974 the game switched to cowhide—tanned leather. I grew up hitting cowhide-covered balls with metal bats, never giving much thought to either one.
Bats have changed a lot over the years, and not just in what they’re made of. Size matters, too. In my era, the early 1990s to mid-2000s, a typical big-league bat was 34 inches long and weighed 32 ounces. That’s exactly two pounds. It’s about what a liter bottle of soda weighs. In the olden days, sluggers like Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig swung bats made of hickory, a wood that’s denser than ash. You’ll hear old-timers swear that the Babe used a 36-inch bat that weighed 40 or even 50 ounces, but that’s a crock. I’ve swung one of Babe Ruth’s game-used bats, and there’s no way it weighed even 40 ounces. Thirty-six, maybe. “My idea on weight is that you should use a bat as heavy as you can handle,” Ruth said. I’m saying that was 36 inches and 34 to 36 ounces for him. Gehrig’s bats were supposedly the same length—a yard to the inch—and 40 or 41 ounces. Don’t buy that, either. Sure, bats were heavier then, mainly because their weight was more evenly distributed, with more weight in the handle. I’m still betting somebody in the Yankee clubhouse had his thumb on the scale when they weighed Ruth’s and Gehrig’s bats, if they even had a scale.
There are a lot of myths about the legendary players, partly because reporters wanted to make them seem larger than life. That might be one reason you hear that Babe’s bat was a tree trunk and Lou swung a phone pole. I’ve also heard Joe DiMaggio’s bat was 38 inches and 40 ounces. I’ll believe that when I see one. Ty Cobb might be a different story. He claimed to use hickory bats that were 34½ inches long and anywhere from 36 to 40 ounces. That might be true because Cobb, whether you think he was a racist or not, was also a scientist at the plate, choking up and slapping the ball to all fields.
My Gramps could have told you who changed the game for good. It was his idol Ted Williams, the ultimate hitting scientist. When Williams came to the majors in 1939 he brought a bat bag full of white-ash Louisville Sluggers that weighed 33 ounces apiece. He could swing them faster than old-fashioned hitters with their hickory tree trunks.
That’s the trade-off: you want the heaviest bat you can swing fast. A lighter bat means swing speed, while heavier lumber a
dds density—and power. Williams, the Splendid Splinter, was the first to really optimize the trade-off. His bats were 35 inches and 33 ounces. In the jargon of the game that’s a bat drop of minus two. For almost a hundred years the difference between a bat’s length and weight went the other way, but after Williams started hitting rockets with his “toothpicks,” everybody switched to ash bats with more inches than ounces. With a lighter bat, Ted could watch a pitch a split second longer and trigger his swing a split second later. Ever since his day, bat drops have been in the minuses. No hitter from high school to the major leagues would even dream of using one with a bat drop of zero. That’s just one of the ways the game has evolved.
As it turns out, Williams’s minus two was pretty close to perfect. (Gramps, you were right—old Ted was a genius.) By the time I reached the majors I’d settle on a 34-inch, 32-ounce Louisville Slugger, for a minus-two drop that’s pretty close to universal in 2016. I’ve seen scientific studies showing that the ideal bat for a modern power hitter is within an inch and an ounce of the bats I used to swing.
Of course it’s not quite that simple. The bat that squares up a 98-mph fastball in April might start feeling heavy in August, when you’re achy and sleep-deprived. At that point, if you’re smart, you go to minus 2½. In August, 34 inches and 31½ ounces gets the bat to the same spot in the hitting zone.
Like Williams and most of my contemporaries, I liked a wide grain in the wood. You hear a lot about grain in wooden bats, but what does that mean?
Everybody knows that trees have age rings. Ash trees, hickory trees, maple trees—they produce a new ring every year. Each ring represents a year’s worth of growth for the tree, and a wide grain means the tree grew fast that year. That’s the wood I want in my bat, because a healthy tree makes strong, dense lumber. A wide grain might add a couple of ticks to one of those trendy stats you keep hearing about: exit velocity. These days, teams release players or trade them if their exit velocity—the speed of the ball off the bat—isn’t up to snuff. You can think of exit velocity as the flip side of fastball speed. A hundred miles an hour is terrific, 90 is decent, and below that you should probably think about another line of work.
You gotta love the science of the game. It comes down to the simplest thing in the world—hit a ball with a stick—but there are so many variables, so many details. When I broke in, big-league hitters still weighed bats on a bathroom scale. In the late ’90s electronic scales came in. Edgar Martinez and I brought one of the first into the Mariners clubhouse. We discovered that hardly any of our 32-ounce bats weighed 32 ounces. They weren’t far off, almost always between about 31.8 ounces and 32.2, but that could be enough to turn a double into an out. So we’d toss any bat that didn’t meet our specs. Not in the trash. The rejects were still good bats, good enough for anything but big-league combat, so we’d give them to rookies or to the clubbies who look after the players and earn most of their money in tips.
We got our bats for free, of course. If you signed a deal with Louisville Slugger, like about 60 percent of major leaguers at the time, you got a few grand a year from Hillerich & Bradsby, plus all the bats you needed shipped to you wherever you were, usually by UPS. A typical big leaguer goes through 150 to 250 bats a year, depending on how persnickety he is and what kind of wood he prefers.
From Ted Williams’s time to the 1990s, just about everybody swung an ash bat. Then hitters began switching from ash bats to maple. It’s a denser wood, a little harder. People who care about stuff like this—woodheads, you could call them—usually give Barry Bonds credit for bringing maple to the majors. It’s true that Bonds’s 73 homers in 2001 made other players think, I want a bat like Barry’s, but the Blue Jays’ Joe Carter got there first. Carter won the 1993 World Series with a maple-bat homer off the Phillies’ Mitch Williams.
At first, maple bats had a scary tendency to shatter, sending sharp pieces flying all over the lot. The Cubs’ Tyler Colvin was leading off third base in 2010 when a teammate ripped a broken-bat double. A chunk of the bat stabbed Colvin in the chest, puncturing his lung and sending him to the hospital. It could easily have killed him. After that, Major League Baseball conducted a study of maple bats and put in quality-control regulations to make them safer. Then, when Oakland’s Brett Lawrie broke his bat grounding out in 2015, a piece of his maple bat hit a fan in the face. She lived, but it was another horrible moment.
Some people say we should ban maple bats. I don’t see that happening. Too many hitters have switched to maple, and the companies that make and sell their bats would raise hell. They’d probably sue MLB. Today, more than half of all major-league hitters use maple bats. It’s about two-thirds maple, one-third ash, going more toward maple every year. I’d say 80 percent of players under twenty-five years old use maple bats. Are they dangerous? Yes. But the real question is, are they significantly more dangerous than ash bats? I doubt it. Still, recent incidents with maple bats have led teams to consider building new screens to protect fans in the front rows. Would that make more sense than banning maple bats? Maybe. That’s not my jurisdiction. What I know best about bats can be boiled down to this: hitting’s hard, and so’s a good piece of wood.
It took me about a week in the Carolina League to find a wooden bat that suited my all-or-nothing swing. That bat had the drop-two specs I would use with rare exceptions for the rest of my career: 34 inches, 32 ounces. I was ready to set the league on fire.
So one night I’m at War Memorial Stadium and who’s standing in the dugout, strapping on his shin guards? Don’t guess, because it’s too much like a bad movie—hungry hotshot starts his pro journey, reaches for his bat, and sees…
Jim Campanis.
“Hello, Boonie,” he said.
“Not you again.”
He said, “I’m still going to beat you to the Show.” His favorite topic.
I was just getting used to life in the minors. The Show was a thousand miles away. I said something like, “Good for you, Jimmy.”
“Want to bet on it?”
That got my attention.
“I’ll bet you a car,” he said. Jimmy never lacked for motivation.
I said, “Well, I’m not driving some Pinto.”
“A BMW. I’ll bet you a BMW that I beat you to the big leagues.”
I had to think about that for one-tenth of a second. “You’re on.”
I had a lousy vehicular history. My last car was still rusting by the road in Hampton, Virginia. The one before that was long gone, too. I’d gone out and spent most of my pro signing bonus on a jet-black Ford Bronco I tricked out with a quadraphonic Blaupunkt sound system you could hear from space. My A-ball teammates would feel the ground shake and say, “Boonie’s in the parking lot.” Then came April 1991. Tax time. To my surprise, Uncle Sam wanted a third of the bonus I’d already spent.
I called Dad. “Help!” He helped, but I had to sell my pimped-out Bronco. That was one of my first lessons in professional baseball: no matter how much you make, it’s not as much as it sounds like.
I hit eight home runs that first summer with Pilots, and they came with a slash line of .267/.383/.427. For those who don’t follow baseball stats, a slash line is your batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. My slash translated to fair/pretty damn good/decent. What mattered to me was that it got me promoted to Double-A ball the next spring, just like my dad predicted.
Like Dad said, I could have pouted and held out when the Mariners drafted me in the fifth round, but it would have cost me a year. Instead I went straight to short-season A-ball and kicked ass. Or at least nudged ass. So the next April, the month when I turned twenty-two, the Mariners called me up to their Double-A farm club, the Jacksonville Suns, two steps from the majors.
At the Double-A level you’re halfway up the minor-league chain. You play in bigger towns. You’re in Orlando and Memphis instead of Winston-Salem and Lynchburg, and believe me, a Holiday Inn in Orlando is nicer than the Lynchburg Motel 6. Double-A ballparks are bigger,
too. Most nights, you can actually hear the fans. The players’ postgame spread is more like sandwiches and Caesar salad instead of hot dogs. The buses don’t break down as much. The girls are prettier. It makes you picture how amazing the majors are going to be if you ever make it that far. Not that I had any doubts on that score.
One night we played the Birmingham Barons, the Royals’ Double-A farm club. Bo Jackson was spending a couple of weeks with the Barons, rehabbing an injury. We knew each other because he’d been a Royals teammate of Dad’s. And while Bo may have been one of the best pure athletes who ever played the game, his baseball instincts weren’t perfect. He was always a football guy in a baseball cap. Early in the game he smashed a single and gave me a wink as he rounded first base. “I’m coming for you, Boonie,” he said. We instantly picked him off. But instead of diving back toward first, he took off for second at top speed. The first baseman threw me the ball, and I was thinking this was fun. We had Bo in a rundown. Except that he kept barreling toward me. I showed him the ball, like you’re supposed to do, and instead of turning back toward first, he sped up. I thought, Does Bo know he’s not allowed to run over the second baseman? Here he came at Mach 12. Then he stopped a foot away from me. On a dime. Stopped and touched his toe to second base. I put the tag on him. I was too late, but the play was just so weird that the umpire called him out anyway. Bo wasn’t upset; it’s a minor-league out. He tapped me on the butt and said, “You know I was safe.”
Yeah, Bo, but I still don’t know how you did it.
That season, I represented the Jacksonville Suns at the 1991 Southern League All-Star Game. By then I was starting to get known for my glove as well as my bat. I’d heard that Mariners GM Woody Woodward didn’t think much of my defense. Or my bat, for that matter. Or my infectious charm. But the thing about baseball defense is, it’s a craft. A lot of hitting, maybe most of it, is God-given talent, but defense is something you can learn by repetition, especially infield defense. That’s why I spent hour after hour in the Florida sun, taking ground balls before most of the guys showed up. Infield defense is a little like dancing; it’s footwork and timing. Field 100 ground balls and you might get a little quicker to the baseball and better balanced on the balls of your feet. Field 10,000 and you might get better than Woody Woodward ever expected. That may sound like a whole lot of grounders, but do the math: 100 grounders before every game for 100 games, that’s 10,000. Enough to make a difference.