![]() This left the company with its Bionic Gloves division and its ownership and operation of the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory. In 2016, Hillerich & Bradsby sold its PowerBilt golf club division to Hilco Streambank, an arm of Hilco Global. Since 2001 Louisville slugger's market share of MLB players using their bats has been on a steady decline. Hillerich IV said that he had wanted to keep the bat business in the family, but that the sale was made because the company no longer can compete with larger, multinational companies that have more resources. Hillerich and Bradsby continues (as of 2021) to manufacture Louisville Slugger bats in its Louisville factory, but under the aegis of Wilson Sporting Goods. In 2015, Hillerich and Bradsby sold its Louisville Slugger division to Wilson Sporting Goods, an arm of Amer Sports which itself is an arm of the Chinese company Anta Sports. TPS Hockey was acquired three years later by Sher-Wood. In 2005, Hillerich & Bradsby sold its majority interest in its Louisville TPS hockey equipment business. In 1996, the company returned to Louisville. In 1976, the company moved across the Ohio River, to Jeffersonville, Indiana, to take advantage of the railroad line there. In 1954, the company purchased Larimer and Norton, Inc., a Pennsylvania lumber company to ensure a supply of hardwood for their products. ĭuring World War II, the company produced wooden rifle stocks and billy clubs for the U.S. Several major golf championships were won by players using PowerBilt clubs, including the Masters Tournament in 1967, 1971, 1979, and 1987. In 1916, Hillerich and Bradsby began manufacturing golf clubs, eventually creating the PowerBilt brand for the clubs. R-43 is the company model number for the bats used by Babe Ruth. įrank Bradsby, a salesman, became a partner in 1916, and the company's name changed to "The Hillerich and Bradsby Co." By 1923, H&B was selling more bats than any other bat maker in the country, and legends like Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth (R-43), and Lou Gehrig were all using them. In 1905, Honus Wagner signed a deal with the company, becoming likely the first American athlete to endorse an item of sports equipment. ![]() The bats were sold under the name "Falls City Slugger" until Bud Hillerich took over his father's company in 1894, and the name "Louisville Slugger" was registered with the US Patent Office. Hillerich & Bradsby bat used by Babe Ruth in a 1927 game, exhibited at the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory Bud saw the potential in producing baseball bats, and the elder Hillerich eventually relented to his son. ![]() For a brief time in the 1880s, he turned away ball players. He saw the company future in stair railings, porch columns and swinging butter churns. Hillerich was uninterested in making bats. ![]() Browning told his teammates, which began a surge of professional ball players to the Hillerich woodworking shop. Browning accepted the offer, and got three hits to break out of his slump with the new bat the first day he used it. īud invited Browning to his father's shop to hand-craft a new bat to his specifications. The team's star, Pete "Louisville Slugger" Browning, mired in a hitting slump, broke his bat. 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. During the 1880s, Hillerich hired his seventeen-year-old son, John "Bud" Hillerich. Hillerich opened his woodworking shop in Louisville in 1855. The "Largest Bat in the World" outside the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory
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