Sunday Louisville

Louisville is famous for the Louisville Slugger baseball bat. The place where they make the bats is in downtown. We walked about 10 blocks to get there and we were just in time for the next tour of the manufacturing process that was starting.



It was Sunday so the actual machinery wasn’t being used but we still got to go the usual tour route and were shown videos at each station to show the process of making a baseball bat. (Pictures were not allowed inside the tour)

They use maple and ash trees. They cut the tree trunks to the proper “bat-length”, 4 or 5 circles are drawn on the end of the wood and then a splitter splits the wood lengthwise. You now have 4 or 5 triangle shaped pieces of wood the length of a bat.

They stick the wood on a lathe and round it off into what is called a billet. It now looks like a bat-length cylinder about 2” round. There are thousands of different shapes to bats and each shape has its own computer code in this machine. They dial in the code and the bat is cut with an automatic lathe in about 45 seconds.

They sand the bat smooth. They brand it with the player’s name and Louisville Slugger. They stain the bat and then let it dry.

Cheaper bats are made a little different and faster. They will saw the tree instead of splitting the wood. The final bat shapes are cut using dies instead of the computer as the bat shaper machine traces the die while it cuts the bat into shape.

They also have a museum there. There were some videos, a chance to stand behind the plate and watch a 90 mph fastball hit the catcher’s mitt, and a broadcast booth with famous announcers talking for a minute (yes, Vin Scully was in there)

For $1 you could try to hit 10 baseballs at 50 mph. I was the only one to do this but I managed to hit all 10 balls.



We left the museum and wandered around town taking pictures of the city. Doug was in this town in 1957 for a Square Dancing exhibition and we walked by the Convention Center where he performed.

The waterfront area is really pretty and very large. There were families swimming in the river/fountain area, a group playing Frisbee Football, others in the playground, bike riders, skateboarders, and walkers.

We left town at 5pm and headed for our next city – Madison, Indiana.

Tonight was “dress-up” night. Ties and dresses.





Prime-rib and fish and more desserts.