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While the majority of today's youth baseball players swing aluminum or other metallic based baseball bats, a small percentage of players still utilize good old wooden baseball bats known as Louisville Sluggers in the sport known as America's favorite pasttime.

Louisville Sluggers can be seen in every Major League baseball game because, well simply put over ninety percent of Major League players use the Louisville Slugger when they go up to bat. Not only are Louisville Sluggers the brand choice of bat in the Major Leagues, but they also have quite an interesting history that actually dates back to more than a hundred years ago.

The history behind this famous line of baseball bats goes way back to the year 1855, when the Hillerich family owned woodworking shop opened. It was quite some time, almost thirty years later, 1884 that the company produced a baseball bat. Once the small company began mass producing baseball bats, the bats were given the title Falls City Slugger, until the name Louisville Slugger replaced the old one in 1894. The name, Louisville Slugger, is of course because the company operates out of Louisville, Kentucky.

The early years of the Louisville Slugger were filled with popularity when Pittsburgh Pirate Honus Wagner signed a deal with Hillerich, therefore becoming the first official Major League baseball player to endorse the Louisville Slugger baseball bat.

Following the endorsement offer between Hillerich's bat company and the baseball star, millions of Louisville Slugger ball bats were sold across America. Then, a couple years later in 1916, a salesman named Frank Bradsby became partners with Hillerich, thus renaming the company Hillerich & Bradsby.

Baseball bats were manufactured by the company for the next thirty years before World War II hit home, and the company temporarily stopped production of baseball bats in order to manufacture war time necessities, such as rifle stocks.

In the years after the second World War, Hillerich & Bradsby found their company back to producing their famous Louisville Slugger ball bats, as well as many other sporting goods including baseball gloves, golf clubs, hockey sticks, and a wide variety of other sports equipment.

Today a baseball player shopping for a wooden baseball bat will have only a few choices. In earlier years, there were a lot of different companies that produced wooden ball bats, but Louisville Sluggers pretty much ran the companies out of business. While a few companies such as Wilson still produce wooden baseball bats, many baseball players consider their construction inferior to that of an official Louisville Slugger. Other ball players will quote the old phrase, "You get what you pay for." which is pretty much the truth, since other wooden bats are priced about half as much as a Louisville Slugger and often crack after very little use.

Although aluminum ball bats are beginning to take over the scene, just remember that a real American baseball game is not complete without the batters using wooden ball bats and their pure strength to crank in the winning run of the game.