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The story of how the iconic Louisville Slugger baseball bat came to be is fascinating.

J.F. Hillerich opened his woodworking shop in Louisville in 1855. During the 1880s,

Hillerich hired his 17-year-old son, John Bud, Hullerich. Legend had 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 star, Pete Louisville slugger,

Browning, was mired in a hitting slump and he broke his bat at his last time at the plate,

but invited Browning to his father's shop to handcraft him a new bat to his own specifications.

Browning accepted the offer and in the next game got three hits to immediately break out of his slump with his new bat.

Browning told his teammates, which began a surge of professional ballplayers pilgrimaging to Hillerich's woodworking shop.

Daddy Hillerich was uninterested in making bats.

He saw the company's future in stair railings,

porch columns, and swinging butter churns. In fact, for a brief time in the 1880s, he even turned away ball players.

Bud, however, saw the potential in producing baseball bats, and Daddy Hilarych eventually relented to his son.

The bats were sold under the name Falls City Slugger until Bud took over his father's company in 1894 and he renamed it the Louisville Slugger and it was registered with the U.S.

Patent Office that year.

By 1923, H&B was selling more bats than any other batmaker in the

country, selling more than 3,000 bats a day. Legends like Taikha, Babe Ruth, and Lou Gehrig

were all using the Louisville Slugger as their bats. After 130 years of home run profits, the

company then sold its Louisville Slugger division to Wilson's

sporting goods for $70 million in cash. All because Bud decided to help one person. You see,

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