Louisville

Went to the Louisville Slugger Factory and Museum, downtown Louisville, Kentucky.

Outside the entrance, The Big Bat is an exact-scale replica of Babe Ruth's 34-inch Louisville Slugger bat. It holds the Guiness World Record for Worlds Largest Baseball Bat, 120 feet tall and weighing 68,000 pounds.

No pictures were allowed in the baseball bat factory, but it was mighty impressive! The huge lathes could carve out a bat in 50 seconds.

There were stacks and stacks of blanks for carving bats waiting to go into the lathe. The wood was northern white ash and maple.

The factory makes about 1.8 million bats a year, about 3,000 per day except during peak production time around Spring Training, when the factory makes about 5,000 bats per day.

 Lego exhibit: Big Leagues, Little Bricks

gift shop tees and posters!

In the museum, there is a film narrated by James Earl Jones, The Heart of the Game. Hearing his voice talking about baseball reminded me of the movie Field of Dreams:

The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: it's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds of us of all that once was good and it could be again. Oh... people will come Ray. People will most definitely come. ~Terence Mann (James Earl Jones) Field of Dreams