He revolutionized bats not with a new shape but a new kind of wood
- The San Juan Daily Star
- Apr 17
- 6 min read
By Zack Meisel / The Athletic
For his first day of work in June 1999, Scott Smith arrived at the makeshift bat factory, a three-level brick corner house in Ottawa, Ontario. Sam Holman handed Smith an order form: six bats, all for José Canseco.
Holman handled the first one. Then, it was Smith’s turn. Craftsmanship is not for those with trembling hands. His initial attempt at a handmade bat did not go well, and Holman was irate.
“I was thinking my career might last for a half-hour,” Smith said.
Smith asked if he could start with a simpler assignment.
“Nope,” Holman replied. “Canseco needs these bats. We’re making them today.”
Every minute was precious in those nascent days of Sam Bat, after Holman discovered that maple bats, not just the century-old standard ash models, could meet professional hitters’ needs. Holman upset the stasis of the bat industry, and in his 300-square-foot garage, as business boomed, he and his crew hustled to meet demand.
“It was sink or swim,” Smith said. “Some of the swimming looked pretty awkward, but we stayed above water.”
Torpedo bats have become the rage this year, but before this latest craze, there was maple mania in the late 1990s. Despite rival companies insisting maple was a fad, Smith said, it stuck a landing in a sport resistant to change. In fact, more than three-fourths of big league hitters now use maple. Those same manufacturers that once doubted its staying power ultimately adopted it themselves.
And it is all because of Holman, with a request from a scout, an assist from a big league slugger and the pursuit of a home run record.
“He didn’t have children,” said Arlene Anderson, Holman’s business partner. “This was his baby.”
Holman was in his early 50s, with a South Dakota drawl and denim overalls. He spent 24 years as a stagehand at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa, where he dealt with musicians, dancers and actors. The carpentry work he completed in his role prepared him for the assignment that would change his life — and upend a sport.
Holman and Bill Mackenzie, a Colorado Rockies scout, met at the Mayflower Pub, an Ottawa haunt that Smith managed until he joined Holman’s outfit. In 1996, after a day of watching one ash bat after another splinter, Mackenzie settled into his bar stool and said to Holman, “Why don’t you do something about it?”
The next day, Holman started a crash course in bat science. He figured he could not make a sturdier ash bat, which had been perfected since the 1880s. He needed a different source of wood. He visited Ottawa’s patent library and the National Research Council, where he learned the density of maple is not too different from that of ash. Maple has a tight grain structure and is a harder wood than ash, giving it the potential to be more durable.
In those early days, before Holman owned a factory, his house doubled as a workshop. They painted the bats in the basement, boxed them in the kitchen and prepared them for shipping in the living room. In the middle of the two-car garage sat a cutting machine that Holman built. Four workers crammed into the garage at a time: two to operate the machine, one to finish the bat with hand turning and one to sand it.
Holman first tested his model with the Triple-A Ottawa Lynx that summer. In April 1997, he persuaded three Toronto Blue Jays players to try them during batting practice: Carlos Delgado, Ed Sprague and Joe Carter.
Carter took a liking to them, telling Holman: “You really have something here.” Major League Baseball had not yet approved maple bats, but Carter sneaked one into a game and hit a home run with it. Smith remembered thinking, “This is something out of a movie.”
MLB approved the use of maple bats the next year.
That first year, Holman said, he made 80 bats. The next year, 2,000. In addition to the maple bats’ durability, players liked that they allowed them to hit for greater power; the hardness of the wood transmitted more energy from the bat to the ball than ash.
By spring training in 1999, he was drowning in maple bat orders. And then Barry Bonds bought in.
At the peak, Holman and his crew produced 15,000 bats in a year in that garage. When Bonds chased down the single-season home run record in 2001, business zoomed. Holman said he borrowed $100,000 that year to spur production, but he still could not keep up.
Weeks after Bonds hit home run No. 73, Holman converted the Rochester Tavern in Ottawa into his new plant.
A casual endeavor originating from a conversation at a bar had swelled into a full-fledged supply chain for America’s pastime. By the early 2000s, Holman had clients with nearly every major league team. A Sam Bat fueled Vladimir Guerrero and Manny Ramirez to Silver Slugger awards and Jeff Kent to the National League MVP Award. Albert Pujols was the NL rookie of the year with one.
“There was a real element of surrealism to the whole thing,” Smith said.
Bonds invited Holman into the dugout at Olympic Stadium in Montreal. Holman watched him slug an opposite-field home run. Holman has an unlimited inventory of stories. Holman said he was sitting in the hotel connected to Skydome when Canseco smacked a baseball to the grill in the hotel kitchen.
“You don’t often get a steak tenderized by a baseball,” Holman said. “The chef was certainly surprised.”
Holman never turned down a news media request. “The old-world craftsman tone dropped out of him effortlessly,” Smith said.
Holman and his brand — formally known as the Original Maple Bat Corp. — were highlighted in Reader’s Digest and Sports Illustrated. Before a New York Times profile was published, the writer asked Holman if he could handle the 1,000 orders that would most likely come his way once the article ran. No, he could not. But what could he do? Everyone wanted a piece of maple.
Maple adoption was not without its bumps. At one point, MLB altered the rules around maple bat production out of concern that the hardness of the wood was causing them to break in ways that could be dangerous. But those issues faded, production techniques evolved, and in 2018, Holman’s company even won an Emmy for supplying the bats used in a Danny Glover-narrated video broadcast when the San Francisco Giants retired Bonds’ No. 25.
Nowadays, Smith heads home after work, cooks dinner, pours a glass of wine and turns on a baseball game. It’s still thrilling, he said, to watch a player hit a home run with something he designed. It remains a thrill for Holman, too, although his baseball viewership has waned over time. He knows all about the recent torpedo barrel craze, and he speaks about it with both nonchalance and an expertise he never imagined he would wield.
The Mayflower Pub no longer exists, replaced by a Scotch whisky establishment. Holman has not sipped a beer since he underwent quadruple bypass surgery four years ago.
“Water’s good for you at certain points in your life,” he said.
He struggles to stand and work with his hands. He is no longer crafting bats, but he still resides in that corner house and can still walk around Ottawa, where he says, “Everybody knows who I am.” After all, he is the only octogenarian with hints of blond hair, he said. But it’s also because he influenced an entire sport by taking a friend’s challenge and, well, knocking it out of the park.
“I know I changed the game. Absolutely,” he said. “One hundred percent, I changed it.”
“I feel like it gives you the feeling like you have more to work with,” he said. “You probably don’t have more to work with, but it feels like it. It gives you that extra confidence in your head to go out there and hit anything.”
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