The Positive Grip Baseball Bat

The Louisville Slugger bat is advertised as “the bat of champions since 1884.” Professional players, semi-professionals, and amateur players have used this bat since that date. It has been “the bat” for many major leaguers during the intervening years and, in fact, during the 1940s and 1950s almost every major leaguer used a Louisville Slugger bat. With escalating baseball salaries, major leaguers can now easily afford to have personalized bats made for them. This has resulted in more companies and mom and pop businesses entering the baseball bat manufacturing business. In the early 1900s there were also individuals who became bat manufacturers as baseball expanded and there was an increased demand for bats by amateur teams as well as players in the professional leagues. One of the individuals who manufactured bats during that era was Wellington Stockton Titus.

Titus was not a novice about baseball. He played third base for many years on the Hopewell, New Jersey, town team. However, his greatest claim to fame was the fact that he patented the first portable baseball backstop on April 9, 1907. It is not known when he decided to go into the baseball bat manufacturing business, but he was successful in manufacturing bats that were used extensively by players in the Hopewell area, and some old-timers there insist that his bats were also used by players on the Philadelphia Athletics. There is a certain logic to this claim, since the first major league team to use his portable baseball backstop was the Philadelphia A’s.

Titus was a skilled, self-taught engineer who had the ability to design and build many items that were not readily available in stores during the late 1800s and early 1900s. He was renowned for his skill as a house mover, and at various times in his life he also served as a postmaster, civil engineer, house builder, and farm foreman. He was characterized as being a person who was always looking for a challenge. The bat he designed showed his perceptive qualities, as it had a special feature which he referred to as the “positive grip.” The positive grip consisted of circular grooves, that he had cut into the handle of the bat. He designed a lathe to make these grooves which went from the knob of the bat to about four inches from the trademark. The purpose of these grooves was to provide a firm grip for the hitter. It was common to put various substances or tape on the bat handle to prevent the bat from slipping in the hitter’s hand when swinging. Even pine tar wouldn’t be needed if the positive groove bat developed by Wellington Stockton Titus had been a business success!

The trademark on his bat had the inscription:

TITUS’ POSITIVE GRIP BAT
“MY SPEED”
MANUFACTURED BY W. S. TITUS
GLENMORE, NJ

The town of Glenmore no longer exists, but it was a small village near the current town of Hopewell when Mr. Titus was manufacturing his bats. In fact, Mr. Titus was the postmaster in Glenmore for a brief period.

He later changed his trademark slightly by burning a black diamond into the wood. His bats then became known as the Black Diamond bats and were in high demand by baseball players in the area. There is the theory that his bats were also used by the players on the Philadelphia Athletics’ team and other professional teams.

Some of his bats had orange and black rings on them, which gave them the appearance of a tiger’s tale. The tiger is the mascot of Princeton University and their colors are orange and black. George Wells, the son of the owner of the farm where Mr. Titus was foreman, was an outstanding baseball player at Princeton University. It is probably this connection that led to the placing of orange and black stripes on some of his bats. He was always the innovator.

Wellington Stockton Titus was not only an inno­vator, but he was a person who looked forward to new challenges. It was probably this spirit that resulted in the demise of his bat manufacturing business. The company that was seasoning his bats for him tried to speed up the process and either had the ovens too hot or left the bats to cure for too long a period of time. His bats became dry and brittle and broke upon impact with a baseball. At this point he became frustrated, went out of the baseball bat manufacturing business, and moved on to new challenges. He was a proud person, and he knew that the reputation of his baseball bats was ruined.

Mr. Titus was a perceptive person. Maybe he anticipated that the grooves in his bat would eventually become illegal as the baseball equipment rules became more sophisticated and stringent than they were at the time he was manufacturing his “positive grip” bat. His grooves would not be permitted by the current rules of either Major League Baseball or the NCAA.

• Major League Baseball Official Rule 1.10.(a) The bat shall be a smooth, round stick not more than …
• NCAA Rule I Section 11. a. Wood bat. The bat must be a smooth, rounded stick not more than …

Both the major league rules and the NCAA rules do permit any substance or material up to 18 inches from its end to improve the grip. He designed his bat to improve the grip by making grooves for about 18 inches from the end without the problem of putting on tape or other substances that were commonly used during his era to give a better grip to the batter. Baseball rules requiring a smooth bat made it easier to standardize bats and not give an advantage to batters who had different configurations of their bats. It is also possible that hitting a ball on the grooved part of the handle could change the trajectory of the ball. Although Mr. Titus designed his grooved bat solely to provide a better grip for the batters, batters might get an unnatural bounce or misdirection on the ball when it came off the grooved part of the bat surface. These factors probably led to the smooth bat requirement in baseball rules.

There is an interesting epilogue to the life history of Wellington Stockton Titus. Almost 94 years after he received his patent for the portable baseball backstop, and 60 years after his death, he was inducted into the Inventors’ Hall of Fame, where he joined such famous New Jersey inventors as Einstein and Edison.

KEN TILLMAN grew up in Iowa and became a lifelong Cleveland Indians fan due to the influence of fellow Iowan, Bob Feller. He is a retired physical education professor/coach and currently lives in Virginia