A Craftsman in More Than One Medium.

Hard-core baseball fans, take note. To please you, new writing about baseball (centrally or tangentially) has to attain instantly to the handled humility of lore. This at Sippican Cottage will please you.

You can never improve on a wooden baseball bat. It's not possible, because to tinker with it is to destroy it. The clink an aluminum bat makes when you hit the ball has no oompah. It's got no anima. It's got no whatsis. The meaning in the thing is lost. Why not use a mortar or a bazooka and be done with it? [ ... ]

[I]f I bought a baseball bat tomorrow, I'd buy one of those magnificent dyed and lacquered maple affairs that have come into popularity recently. An old fashioned Hillerich and Bradsby Louisville Slugger is made from Ash. Ash is a stringy, dense, heavy, stiff wood that has a long and storied history of being made into axe handles.

An axe handle. A plow handle. An adze. A grub hoe. Think of the iconic status of the baulk of wood itself before it becomes that same utilitarian thing fashioned to bring the joy of the physical test to the user and the audience alike.

But someone said: Maple. Lighter, but harder. Smooth. Chastely grained, not the big roping sawtooth whorls of the Ash. They made a bat from Maple and said: I've made it better but I did not destroy the meaning of the thing.

Of course, he's not just talking about baseball bats, he's talking about change.

Don't interfere if you've got nothing but ideas on how things should be "different." "Different" is not the operative and essential part of "good." It's as likely to be good's enemy as not. Don't make it worse [ ... ]

Make it better, without destroying the meaning of the thing. If you can.

Comments

[wj]

And there-in lies the nub: what characteristics are meaningful, and what are merely coincidental? For a bat, even metal can have the "correct" length and maximum diameter. But what, beyond those geometric characteristics, is critical?

I suspect that the same conflict over what is meaningful occurs thruout our lives. Not least in politics and government -- what is critical and what is merely the way things chanced to be done in the past?

But the real rub is that we don't recognize that deeper source of conflicts. Alas.

[Jean Gottlieb]

I thought bats were originally made of hickory.
Many objects of the hand--rag paper, leather (books) used to have a heft, balance, life to them that's lost because we've squandered the source and the resource: the sweet, durable leather of mountain goats, the linen rags, the close-grained trees that gave us non-splintering wood. Forests must be saved; animals shouldn't be slaughtered for our uses; rags? everything is synthetic, which can't stand up to the long term use.

Mom

[triticale]

And then you saw off the end with a very fine blade, bore out the body, fill it with cork, refit the end and refinish. Almost as effective as steroids.