How a 17-year-old kid changed baseball forever A brief history of Louisville Slugger and Hillerich & Bradsby In many ways, the rich, 120-year history of the Louisville Slugger baseball bat began in the talented hands of 17-year-old John A. “Bud” Hillerich. Bud’s father, JF Hillerich, owned a growing woodworking shop in Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1880s when Bud began working for him. 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 Browning, mired in a hitting slump, broke his bat. Bud invited Browning over to his father’s shop to make him a new one. With Browning at his side giving advice, Bud hand-crafted a new bat from a long slab of wood. Browning got three hits with it the next day. From butter churns to baseball history Browning told his teammates, which began a surge of professional ball players to the Hillerich shop. Yet JF Hillerich had little interest 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 even turned away ball players. Bud persisted; he saw the future in bats. His father, pleased with his son’s enthusiasm, relented. The rest is baseball history. In 1894, with Bud Hillerich taking over from his father, the name “Louisville Slugger” was registered with the US Patent Office. In the early 1900s, the growing company pioneered a sports …

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