Superior Bat Co.

The Superior Bat company was started up in 1920 by Garnett Beck, brother of Zinn Beck, a major League ball player that played with the St. Louis Cardinals, from 1913-1916, and the New York Yankees in 1918. The brothers opened a factory in Columbia, South Carolina, where Zinn was playing in the minor leagues from 1920-1925, and Garnett started turning out laminated bats. In 1923 the Zinn Beck Bat Company moved to Greenville. The company was sold in 1927. In 1930 Garnett Beck sold a patent for $1,000., to the Hillerich & Bradsby Co. to strengthen bats with a glue process. The next ten years Garnett worked as a foreman for Louisville Slugger.

Beck's patented process produced bats that were laminated, instead of being made of one piece of wood. A laminated bat is composed of four strips of ash and one of hickory, glued together under great pressure and then turned and sanded into shape like any other bat. The center section was ash, and had hickory on each side. The heavier, stronger hickory wood forms the handle and the core of the laminated bat with the ash glued around it to form the barrel.

Because of a major league rule change requiring bats to be made of one piece of wood, in 1940 Hillerich & Bradsby did away with the glue process, which eliminated Garnett's job. Garnett Beck bounced around until 1951 when he was back in business making bats for the newly formed Joe Engle Bat Co. in Chattanooga, Tennessee. The company went out of business four years later. Beck then went to work on Engel's chicken farm for a short time.

Leaving the chickens behind, Beck returned to Louisville and opened a small factory on Wilson street. For the next five or six years, he sold every bat he could turn out to local distributors. Inflation and competition got the best of him. He couldn't afford to automate. While H&B turned out about 5 million bats a year, Garnett Beck and his Superior Bat Co. produced one every seven minutes on his hand lathe. By then he was in his early 70's and decided to open a little shop in his home in Chesterfield, Indiana, around 1969. Because of his age, and the soaring price of wood, the Superior Bat company went out of business in 1971.

Superior Bat Company Baseball Bats

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