Spring 2010 Cover Story: Swinging for the Fences
Tom Ventura ’04 turns choice pieces of wood into swift and mighty bats
Story and photos by Marc Glass
When Maine’s high school and college baseball players step to the plate for games this season, they’ll no doubt be carrying metal or composite bats. But the most dedicated players—those with dreams of making it to the major league, for whom a batting cage is home away from home—will have practiced for game day with a wood bat. And a growing number of those serious players are swinging wood bats made by Tom Ventura ’04.
Ventura, who co-captained the UMF baseball team as starting catcher his senior year and led the 2004 team in home runs, admits that a player can hit the ball farther with a metal bat. Standard issue among high school and most college teams, metal bats are cost-effective for cash-strapped programs (unlike wood bats, they almost never break), and a player with an inelegant swing or poor pitch selection doesn’t have to connect with the ball near the end of a metal bat, the sweet spot, to make a decent hit. (Connecting with the ball anywhere but the sweet spot on a wood bat invites breakage.)
Why, then, would anyone want to hit with wood?
“If you can hit with a wood bat, which has a smaller sweet spot,” says Ventura, “then you’ll be a better hitter with a metal bat.”
Dick Meader ’68, head coach of the UMF baseball team, agrees: “Metal will cover a multitude of sins in a swing, but there’s no better sound than a hit from a wood bat.”
Even if only in batting practice, more and more high school and college coaches long for that sound, too. Ventura’s bats are used by squads at Biddeford High School, Bonny Eagle High School, and Thornton Academy, as well as at UMF, Colby College, and St. Joseph’s College. Many of the more than 300 bats Ventura has crafted in two years are also swung in the all-wood-bat Twilight League of southern Maine and the Bay League out of Bangor. Nate Laliberte, one of Ventura’s high school classmates, hits with them in the Boston-area Yawkey League and the Boston Amateur Baseball League. And his custom-made bats are seeing action on diamonds across America, too.
“I’ve filled orders from Nevada, New York, Montana, and Oklahoma,” he says. “Most of the interest is by word-of-mouth, but with the Internet, I’m getting orders from all over the place.”
The story behind Ventura’s first bat begins with equal parts inspiration, craftsmanship, and friendship. After majoring in secondary education-social science at UMF and teaching at his high school alma mater, Thornton Academy in Saco, Ventura joined Ventura & Son Woodworkers, Stairbuilders, and Woodturners, in 2006. (Started by his father, Mike, the Biddeford-based fine woodworking operation specializes in high-end custom staircases and historical replication of finials, columns, and balusters for homes throughout New England.)
When subcontracting some of the woodturning became cost-prohibitive, Mike purchased a new industrial-grade lathe. Ventura first experimented with turning serving trays, bowls, rolling pins, “and other fun stuff” for his wife, Hilary Kurlanska Ventura ’05, a health teacher at Bonny Eagle Middle School.
One day in the shop, Ventura spied a knot-free piece of maple. “I thought to myself, ‘You know, baseball bats are wood turnings, too,’” he says.
As he turned the plank into his first bat, Ventura thought of his friend Dave Sharland ’03. The two, says Ventura, have known each other since childhood and were baseball teammates at Thornton Academy and UMF, and in the summer Twilight League. Ventura dyed the bat maroon and gold, the team colors for Thornton Academy, where Sharland teaches U.S. History and assists Greg Paradis ’95, a teacher and dean of students, with coaching the varsity baseball team.
“It was just beautiful,” Sharland says of Ventura’s gift. “It was a work of art.”
Proponents of practicing with wood bats, Sharland and Paradis soon placed a team order for bats, all bearing the team’s colors and Ventura’s signature label, an elegant oval-encompassed V, hand painted on all Ventura bats by his mother, Jean, a calligrapher and watercolor artist.
“They’re excellent bats,” says Paradis of the 15 owned by his program (in addition to 20 purchased by individual players) that have helped Thornton Academy baseball to its “three best offensive seasons” since practicing with wood. “If a bat was ever defective, he would replace it for free. You just can’t get that with Easton or Louisville Slugger.”
Ventura says that as he turns bats, he’s mindful of the players—like senior secondary education-math major Brian Morrison, a member of the UMF baseball team and a Bay League player—who swing for the fences with them. So, to ensure durability, he selects the best wood he can find from Seacoast Lumber in Saco and only turns wood from the edge of the plank, where the grain is tightest and, therefore, strongest.
“You need wood with straight grain, no knots,” he says. “If I find some imperfection, a hidden weak spot in the wood while I’m turning, I take it off the lathe. I just can’t sell that bat to a player. I know it will break.”
Although he will custom turn bats out of ash or maple in dimensions and weights to suit player preferences (and dye them in any team’s colors), Ventura prefers ash because it’s a “more flexible wood,” providing the hitter with not only increased durability over maple, but also, he believes, “more whip” in the swing.
“Maple is hard, but brittle. It’s more likely to shatter if you make a mistake and don’t hit it with the label up on the sweet spot. But Barry Bonds used maple bats—and steroids. I guess that was a good combination,” he says with a laugh.
Ventura hopes one day to get his bats in the hands of Sea Dogs players. For now, he has more than 30 orders to fill, as evinced by the pile of ash blanks on a table near the lathe. Each stick bears penciled notes with length dimensions for the bat-to-be. One is scribed with the words “Coach Meader.”
“He doesn’t know it yet, but that one’s going to be a gift for him,” says Ventura. “I loved playing baseball for Farmington. My senior season was the most fun I ever had playing baseball. Even then, I thought to myself, ‘This is the best it gets.’”
Learn more about Tom Ventura’s baseball bats at www.venturawoodenbats.com