The major league dreams Irv Norton nourishes don`t come from the trunk of a tree struck by lightning in a farmer`s back yard.
Instead, they come from a pile of wood in a dumpy tin mountain shack amid the screams of a sawmill along Conewango Creek.
With wood chunks flying all around him, the old man hunches over, grabs a piece of the northern white ash from the pile and scans it with the cold eye of a public defender reading a police report.
Either the grain is in the wood, or it`s not. Norton decides. There is no business here for Hollywood and Robert Redford, Roy Hobbs and Wonderboy.
”That`s a pro,” says Norton, his voice barely heard above the mill`s din. A faint smile breaks below the curved bill of his blue baseball cap. ”A true pro, right there.”
Norton knows that the particular piece of wood, after eight months of air-drying and then declicate shaping by a craftsman at another plant, might eventually end up in the hands of a Harold Baines or a Ryne Sandberg.
Norton founded and, at age 67, still works the mill on the edge of the Allegheny National Forest, where the northern white ash mix with cherry and maple in a silvery wilderness sculpted by an early spring snow shower.
The dawn`s quiet is broken only by a forester`s tread, the drumming of a ruffed grouse and the soft rustle, then the white flash, of a deer running from the danger of curious interlopers.
The sticks of ash that Norton sorts are from trees that grow tall and straight, pruned by the dense forest.
Timber from the trees is shaped at the mill into billets. Each billet is 40 inches long, rounded, 3 inches in diameter. To a visitor, one is indistinguishable from another, looking like wooden posts in a Sears kit for porch decks.
But to Norton, a crusty fellow who still aches over Roberto Clemente`s death, the pieces of northern white ash hold a secret as deep, and elusive, as trying to hit a Nolan Ryan fastball.
The billets are shipped to the Hillerich & Bradsby Co. plant in Jeffersonville, Ind., where they are turned and finished into Louisville Sluggers. They are the storied bats, made for more than a century by H&B, used by Ruth, Gehrig, Mantle and 60 percent of today`s major leaguers, as well as a majority of those in the minor and rookie leagues.
”It`s easy to pick out the pros,” says Norton. ”You look at the color. It`s got to be white. The grain . . . ” his voice trails off. ”It takes years to learn these things. I can`t really explain it to you.”
But after prodding, Norton handles the ”pro” and tries again.
”This here is good wood, straight, wide, even grain-maybe seven grains to an inch-and a nice light color. The wide grain means it`s a slow-growth tree and is good, hard wood. The color doesn`t make any difference in the hardness of the wood, but the ballplayers like it light, so light wood is good wood. But this is also Ruth wood, heavy.”
For a second, Norton`s gray eyes flash. ”Clemente, now he was my favorite. He used a much lighter wood. This isn`t Clemente wood. All the ballplayers want Clemente wood today. But we don`t know how to make it. Nature makes it.
”They say the wood isn`t as good as it was years ago. Actually, the wood in the good bats is just as good. There just aren`t as many as there used to be.”
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A baseball just doesn`t have the magic. It is stitched in a factory by middle-aged women who wear their eyeglasses on beaded chains around their necks.
But a professional baseball bat, often given the heroic attributes of a weapon of war, is different. It succeeds naturally from a tiny white ash seedling-if the deer don`t eat it first.
Over the cycle of a man`s lifetime, it will reach what foresters call
”economic maturity,” 70 to 80 feet tall, its girth 16 to 20 inches at chest level. Then, the forester marks it for timber.
It is felled, sawed into 10- or 14-foot long logs in the forest, hauled to the Akeley mill, sawed again into 40-inch long logs, split like firewood and turned into the billets that Norton eyeballs one by one.
No bauxite. No strip mines. No scarred earth. No artificial sticks made of lightweight, aluminum alloys designed by man for rocket trips, with a hollow center filled with foam to deaden the ”ping” when it meets a pitched ball.
Just natural wood here. And a workaday matter-of-factness by men such as Norton and Joe Tarr, another old-timer who has cruised the forest for 30 years marking white ash for Larimer & Norton, a lumber operation on both sides of the border between Pennsylvania and New York.
Hillerich & Bradsby bought the mill from Norton nearly 40 years ago and now owns and operates seven mills in the hardwood forests along either side of the border. Two of them are used exclusively for batmaking, turning out about 175,000 bats a year for the major and minor leagues and 800,000 for the retail market, using wood rejected by Norton and others as not good enough for the pros.
The company owns about 7,000 acres of forest and also selects ash from millions of acres of timber in private, commercial and governmental holdings in New York and Pennsylvania. Of the four manufacturers who supply the major leagues with bats, H&B is the only one to own its own woodlands and mills, thus nurturing the timber from the forest floor to the clubhouse.
Like all of what nature makes, the process is simple but astonishing.
Of the tens of thousands of wood species, only white ash will do for baseball bats. It is a strong, hard wood-used in wagon wheels during pioneer days-which resists fracturing upon repeated impact and absorbs shock without transmitting it to the arm.
Other woods, such as hickory, oak and pecan, are hard enough to give force to a batting stroke, but ash is much lighter, allowing for faster bat speed, a component of how far the batter can drive the baseball.
There also is a degree of flex and natural elasticity in ash, which allows it to bend without breaking. This makes it great for pitchforks and ax handles, but also allows it to combine with the powerful swing of a Jose Canseco to drive a baseball farther than a bat made of any other wood.
Consider that the ash, a relative of the olive tree, is found throughout the eastern United States, except Florida, and that it also grows well in the temperate regions of Europe and Japan.
But the only ash trees good enough for professional baseball bats-whether made by companies from Japan, Canada or the U.S.-are those on the hillsides and mountains of Pennsylvania and New York.
No one knows why, though Tarr, the forester, believes it is the unusual moisture-holding qualities of the soil, which gives the trees strong, consistent growth from year to year.
”Then, again, it just might be the genes of the trees we have here,” he says. ”We really don`t know.”
Consider, too, that quality ash survives only by natural propagation. Unlike pine and other woods that thrive row upon row in plantations, man can`t sow the seeds of the white ash and expect its bounty. And once nature sprouts them, the seedlings are highly susceptible because they are a source of food for the white-tailed deer that roam in abundance on the hillsides.
Consider, finally, that though the millions of acres of forestland in Pennsylvania and New York are thick with valued hardwoods, only about 5 percent of it is made up of ash trees. It is not uncommon for a forest stand in the region to contain an average of one ash per acre.
Consider it all.
Now you know that when an 80-year-old ash is felled, it is an event more full of moment than any Roy Hobbs home run.
After it is sawed into smaller logs, split like firewood, turned into the billets and finished, one select tree yields enough quality ash to make two or three major league bats.
That`s right. Two or three, cut only from the prime sapwood of the butt log, the bottom 10- or 14-footer. Roughly, 80,000 trees a year are needed to make 175,000 professional bats. Over an 80-year harvesting cycle, that`s 6.4 million trees.
”It`s simple enough,” says Jack Norton, Irv`s son, who now supervises the mill operations. ”The very best wood, we`ll make a bat out of. What isn`t good enough, we`ll sell into the furniture market.”
Very fine furniture, too. Names such as Henredon, Ethan Allen and Pennsylvania House. Some of the ash, not good enough for professional baseball bats, has been used in furniture reproductions in the Library of Congress and the White House.
This wondrous process of natural selection raises the obvious question:
Will the forest ever run out of ash?
”It`s a good question and the same worry my father has had for many, many years,” says Jack Norton. ”The quality trees are fewer and they`re tougher to find, but somehow we continue to come up with them.”
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The way ballplayers feel about their bats sometimes verges on voodoo.
Orlando Cepeda threw away perfectly good bats after getting hits with them because he believed that each bat contained only one.
George Brett, who uses a Marv Throneberry model, returned the bat he had used during a 30-game hitting streak, saying there were no more hits left in it. It is on display in a museum at the Jeffersonville factory, along with a 41-ounce bat Babe Ruth used in 1927, when he hit 60 home runs. Ruth`s bat has 21 notches around the trademark. He carved it, just like a gunslinger, for each homer hit.
Ted Williams came to the plant when it was in Louisville to sort through the wood billets himself. Don Mattingly does the same thing today. Williams was so persnickety about his bats that once he sent back an order because the handles didn`t feel right. Workers measured and the width was off-by 5/1,000th of an inch.
Dave Parker, who used to wield the heaviest bat in the majors, a 37-inch, 37-ounce stick, describes how Willie Stargell ordered his bats with somebody else`s name on them.
”The year he won the Most Valuable Player Award, 1979, all his bat models had John Candelaria`s name on them,” Parker said while trying out one of three bats, ranging in weight from 34 1/2 to 36 ounces, in the batting cage during Oakland`s recent visit to Comiskey Park.
”I don`t know where Stargell got so superstitious,” Parker said. ”He used to grab a big old ham bone and sit down before every game and bone his bat for about 20 minutes.”
When told of the Stargell story, Parker`s teammate Glenn Hubbard retorted: ”That`s not superstitious. That`s to make the grain stay together. We got a bone in our clubhouse, and I bone mine. I don`t think that`s a superstition.”
Sandberg said there`s also a bone in the Cubs` clubhouse, and until about five years ago he, too, used it.
White Sox manager Jeff Torborg said he has seen players file a flat edge on the barrel of their bats and put tiny nails in it, believing it makes the wood harder.
Other players, afraid of a hex, would wrap their bats in their stockings and lock them up or take them to their room, Torborg recalls.
”In the old days they used to burn a bat with tobacco and polish it with tobacco juice, because they felt it made the wood harder,” said the Ivy League-educated manager.
”Whether this kind of stuff works or not is in the ballplayer`s mind, but you can`t really ignore that,” says Jack Norton, who was a fairly good college ballplayer drafted by the Boston Red Sox.
A lanky left-hander, he pitched semipro ball with Dick Donovan after Donovan`s career with the White Sox and abandoned a career teaching history to take over the mill operations because ”forestry is in my blood, and it`s nice to see God`s grandeur at its best.”
Norton explains the inexplicable-the zany attitudes of ballplayers toward their bats-by comparing them with ancient Oriental warriors.
”A baseball player has an ethic with his bat similar to the one a samurai has with his sword,” says Norton, gripping his hands slowly, finger by finger, around a Mickey Mantle model in his office. ”The sword was tempered in blood. It was part of their soul, an extension of their body. It had life to it.
”A baseball player is like that, too. His bat is an extension of his soul. There may be some rational reason why the same weight bat and the same length bat will feel different and hit a litle different to a ballplayer. But on the other hand, it is just the belief.”
