Hunting for the First Louisville Slugger: A Look at the Pete Browning Myth

Myth, legend and controversy mix together with history and fact in baseball’s churning cauldron of the past. Abner Doubleday’s invention of baseball is a myth. Babe Ruth’s calling his shot in the 1932 World Series is legendary (and probably a myth). The 1969 Mets World Series win is a fact, however improbable and however much praised as legendary by Met fans.

There are other stories in baseball lore that are probably myths, have grown into legend and then, after much repetition, become treated as fact. Did Mike Kelly really insert himself in the lineup as a pop foul was falling toward his bench? Did Candy Cummings really throw the first curveball? These and other nineteenth-century tales have little corroborating evidence beyond the original narrator of the story and its endless retelling in popular history.

Louisville baseball has its “historical” tale that I believe has little basis in fact. It is the story of Pete Browning and the turning of the first Louisville Slugger bat.

The story comes down to us, in endless retellings, that early in the 1884 season, Pete Browning was in something of a slump. On this sunny day he had broken his bat. This was a particularly sad event, as we shall see, due to Pete’s eccentricities regarding these tools of his trade. When the game ended, seventeen-year-old John A. “Bud” Hillerich hopped out of the stands at Eclipse Park at 28th and Elliott Streets in the west end of Louisville, ran over to Browning, tugged at his sleeve and offered to make him a new bat in Hillerich’s father’s wood turning shop. Browning agreed and the two of them made their way to the J.F. Hillerich Job Turning shop on First Street. The teenager and ballplayer worked through the night and crafted a custom-made bat to Browning’s specifications. As befits any creation story, Browning pronounced the bat “good” and proceeded to line out three hits the following day to break out of his slump.

It’s a nice story. A story with just a hint of plausibility. A story of a boy and ballplayer and a brand name known throughout the baseball world. But there are a few problems. There are no contemporary accounts of this event in any newspaper or other source. This is odd on two accounts.

First, Pete Browning was a hometown hero. Born Louis Rogers Browning in Louisville in 1861, the son of a middle-class merchant, he grew up with such friends as Chicken Wolf and the Reccius boys, John and Phil, who would all be teammates on Louisville’s major league team in the 1880s. He picked up the nickname Pete as a child and was a splendid athlete known as a fine runner, ice skater, marble shooter and baseball player.

When Louisville landed a team in the fledgling American Association in 1882, a major league rival to the more established National League, Pete was the team’s star. He was the American Association batting champ in 1882 and a drawing card in every ballpark he visited. He was also garrulous-a man accessible to the fans and to the press. He was always ready to provide a comment for a reporter and if you were buying drinks he was ready to spend some time at the bar with you. So it is unusual that Pete never mentioned this new bat to any of his friends in the press.

Second, Pete was known to have a few strange habits concerning his bats. He believed that each bat had just so many hits in it and when they were exhausted it was time to stop using that club. But he did not discard his bats, he “retired” them. He gave them a name (often of biblical origin) and placed them in the basement of his home. It is said he had over 200 retired bats in his home. So this is not a man who would be shy talking about a special bat.

Throughout Browning’s life no mention of this incident, or anything like it, appeared in any of the Louisville papers or in the sporting press around the country. The first mention of Browning in relation to Hillerich occurs in the Sunday insert of the Louisville Herald Magazine on September 27, 1914. Written by Bruce Dudley (an interesting character himself, as he moved through the baseball world as a sports editor, Louisville Colonel president and finally president of the American Association), it is titled “Every Knock Is a Boost For the Louisville Slugger Bat.” He related the following story:

Many bats are especially for boys, with rings around them-meaning the bats. These rings represent “home runs.” The first one was made by Mr. [Bud] Hillerich for Pete Browning, who always will be remembered in connection with the national pastime … After a slump, he wandered around the Hillerich plant one day and told Mr. Hillerich the last bat that had been made for him was no good. “I can’t hit a thing with it,” he said. “Well, bring it back and I’ll put a home run in it for you,” offered Mr. Hillerich. Mr. Hillerich took the bat, put it into a lathe, and scratched a circle around it. That afternoon Pete poled the promised homer, and ever afterwards his bats were made with rings around them.”

This certainly fits with Browning’s known superstitions about his bats, but it says nothing about his being the first major leaguer to be a recipient of a Hillerich bat. There is no hint of Bud Hillerich returning to the shop with his hero in tow and working through the night to enter baseball immortality.

In fact, the Dudley article related an entirely different story surrounding the first bat. He wrote — presumably after conversations with Bud Hillerich, by this time the head of the company — that young Bud was a good sandlot player in the early 1880s. In 1883 he was a member of the Morning Star team that played in Hillerich’s East End neighborhood around Butchertown, and he used a bat turned by his father, J. Frederick Hillerich.

The story goes that Bud’s cudgel was stolen or misplaced, but was recovered in time for the 1884 season. This was important since his father had decreed that he was too busy to be fooling around making another bat. After all, there were ax handles, bed posts, and butter churns to be made.

With his trusty stick back Bud went off to the field and showed it off to several of his friends, including Gus Weyhing, whom Dudley describes as “just breaking in with the Colonels,” but who was actually a minor league player in 1884 before beginning a pitching career in which he won 264 games for nine major league teams. Gus passed the Hillerich bat around to some of his mates including Joe Gerhardt, Tom McLaughlin, and Monk Cline, all Louisville boys and members of the 1884 Colonels squad.

Dudley wrote that Hillerich gave that first bat to Weyhing and that the other players prevailed on J. Fred to make them bats of their own. He agreed after extracting a promise from each of them never to bother him again about bats. Word spread about the quality of the sticks that were first called Hillerich Bats, then Falls City Sluggers, and finally, in 1894, Louisville Sluggers.

If this 1914 story is correct, where does the Browning story come from?

Through the 1920s and much of the 1930s, little was written in the company records or the sporting goods press about the Louisville Slugger bat. In March, 1939 Sam Severance published a recognizable version of the Browning story in The Sporting Goods Dealer, a trade publication.

Severance’s story was that one day in 1884 Browning broke his bat and was directed by a friend to the Hillerich shop to have another fashioned. There he ran into Bud Hillerich, who agreed to tum a bat for him. After working long into the night, Hillerich produced a piece of lumber that satisfied Pete, who took it to the park the next day and pounded out three hits.

We see here elements of the ultimate story coming together. Browning needing a bat, a meeting with Bud Hillerich, a custom-made bat, and a three-hit game. But Severance did not put this tale forward as fact. He called it a “legend around the H&B factory.” And Severance should have known: he was the head of marketing for Hillerich & Bradsby at the time.

Not surprisingly, Severance’s version of the story is repeated in the Famous Slugger Yearbook of 1939. This publication was an annual promotional booklet produced by Hillerich & Bradsby from the late 1920s to 1978. Distributed to sporting goods dealers for their customers, it contained statistics from the prior season, major league records, and ads and promotional pieces about H&B baseball products. In all probability, Severance put the 1939 Yearbook together.

It is fascinating to follow the Browning story through the Yearbook for the next decade. The story evolved before its readers’ eyes. In 1941 the story was told as a quote from seventy-five-year-old Bud Hillerich, still the firm’s president. In 1942 the story portrayed young Hillerich as a friend of Browning’s. In the 1948 version, Hillerich was not yet acquainted with Browning, but in his desire to meet the star player of his hometown team he approached him after a game with the offer to produce a new bat. The story of Browning breaking his bat and Bud Hillerich “tugging at Browning’s sleeve” to offer him the wood turner’s services appeared in 1949.

The 1949 version of the Browning tale reappeared in the Slugger Yearbooks of 1950, 1954, 1955, and 1959. It was by then virtually the same story we hear today. In 1974, it was put in the mouth of Bud’s grandson, Jack Hillerich, who “retold” it in the ninetieth anniversary edition.

But the trail for the first Louisville Slugger bat does not end here. The hunt continues to take various twists and turns. In the corporate files of Hillerich & Bradsby, housed in the Archive Department of the University of Louisville Library, there is a manuscript of an interview with Arlie Latham by Clifford Bloodgood that was published in Baseball Magazine in November, 1937. Walter Arlington Latham, seventy-seven years old at the time, contended that the first Louisville Slugger was made for him.

Latham, known during his career as “The Freshest Man on Earth,” was the third baseman for the American Association St. Louis Browns. He claimed that on a trip to Louisville in 1883 or 1884 he broke his bat and was unable to find another for sale in the entire city. He eventually wandered into the Hillerich wood turning shop near his hotel and made a deal with J. Fred to have Bud turn a new bat for him by game time the next day. In fulfilling that assignment, Hillerich launched the bat-making business. This is so similar to Sam Severance’s 1939 version of the story that a suspicious person might wonder if Severance liked the idea of an “advent story” for the Louisville Slugger, but preferred a local hero as the protagonist.

Pete Browning was long gone by the late 1930s, but Bud Hillerich was still around. As the one constant in all the stories he could set the record straight. A refutation or confirmation of the Latham story was not forthcoming. We shouldn’t be surprised by this. The Severance story was still over a year away and why should H&B stifle good publicity for their products.

The Latham story now jumps forward thirty-seven years, to a 1974 letter in the Hillerich & Bradsby Archives addressed to Jack McGrath, an H&B marketing executive, from Allen Gibbon of the A. K. Gibbon Lumber Co., of Kansas City, Missouri. After thanking McGrath for some equipment H&B had donated to the local Kiwanis Girls team, Gibbon noted that he had enclosed a copy of the Latham interview with the following note handwritten and signed by Bud Hillerich:

To my Friend

Allen K. Gibbons.

The above is the first, true story of the origin of the Louisville Slugger Base Ball bat. Mr. Latham at age of 82 is still connected in Base Ball, serving at Polo Grounds, N. Y., home of the N. Y. Giants.

Respectfully,

s/ J. A. Hillerich

July 17th, 1942.

The Latham story was told again in 1966 for an article by Leslie Lieber in The Week.

Where does this leave us? Did Browning break his bat? Did Latham break his bat? Was Browning sent to Hillerich by a friend? Was Gus Weyhing given Bud Hillerich’s personal bat? Are any of these stories true?

I discount the Latham story as the tale of a man who had outlived his contemporaries and was not shy about putting himself in the middle of any story. I chalk Bud Hillerich’s 1942 note up to good publicity.

The Browning story is clearly the result of Sam Severance’s fertile public relations mind borrowing the Latham story of two years earlier and inserting Pete as the main character.

The story that makes the most sense to me is Bruce Dudley’s, which makes Gus Weyhing the owner of the first Louisville Slugger. It is the earliest published account, it predates the Latham and Browning tales by over twenty years, and it is the least dramatic and so the most likely.