What did Hillerich & Bradsby do to batmaking?

[sphere and ash]

Hillerich & Bradsby have a museum dedicated to telling the story of their contribution to batmaking. I would like to ask the question their story begs: what did we lose with H&B’s ascendency?

I ask because when I look at pre-H&B bats, they are invariably beautiful, of different woods, including tiger maple. Spalding, despite its mass market positioning, had a beautiful line of store model bats.

When I look at early H&B bats, by contrast, they are bland and indistinguishable. Bats of deadball era stars differ from one another only by their signature (Joe Jackson is a rare exception and one of a very few H&B patents).

Would variation in batmaking have continued if H&B hadn’t introduced the signature model? Or was H&B responsible for reducing variation in batmaking to ash (and later hickory)?

What did H&B really contribute to batmaking?

Please post your pre-H&B bats.

[sphere and ash]

Here is a tiger maple bat. Did H&B ever produce a tiger maple bat? I can't recall ever seeing one.

[MGHPro]

I've never seen a h&b tiger maple bat . Most, if not all, tiger maple bats that I've encountered are pre 1900 hand turned bats with no maker label present , yours would be the exception .
Matt

[T206Jim]

They commoditized bats with their mass production techniques.

Hillerich.jpg

[Mark]

Let's put together a more specific list of what kinds of bats might otherwise have proliferated. Aside from maple bats, what else was out there that was being made by Spalding, Wright and Ditson, Hanna et al that wasn't produced by H&B? double knobs? some sort of special surface treatment? Once the length, width, and shape of the bats became standardized by organized baseball, you weren't going to see banana bats or other exotic bats.

[sphere and ash]

Originally Posted by Mark

Let's put together a more specific list of what kinds of bats might otherwise have proliferated. Aside from maple bats, what else was out there that was being made by Spalding, Wright and Ditson, Hanna et al that wasn't produced by H&B? double knobs? some sort of special surface treatment? Once the length, width, and shape of the bats became standardized by organized baseball, you weren't going to see banana bats or other exotic bats.

There was quite a bit of innovation in bat design around the time of H&B’s launch. Spalding was producing the mushroom knob that had been invented by Jack Pickett, and Wright & Ditson was producing the Lajoie double knob bat, for which it had a patent pending. H&B introduced a “ball balanced“ bat in answer to its competitors, but it doesn’t appear to have gained wide use and H&B doesn’t appear to have done anything else in response.

Spalding was still producing a willow bat in the early 20th century.