Black Betsy

[DOUGHBOYS]

The baseball bat has gotten lighter. Players have inserted cork. The wood itself has changed from a lot of ash to a rash of maple. On Mothers Day, the bat is pink. The bat is an instrument, a tool for the hitter to hit the ball as hard as possible.
What's lost, is the one on one relationship once shared between a hitter and his bat.
In 'The Natural', Robert Redford's character, Roy Hobbs had a close kinship with his bat. His bat's name was 'Wonderboy. The two were as one.
Shoeless Joe Jackson had the same relationship in real life.

In 1903, Shoeless Joe Jackson played on mill teams. Only 15 years old, Jackson shined. His teammates and foes were a lot older than Joe, but Joe was special and folks started taking notice of how he could play baseball.
Charlie Fergerson was a big fan of Joe's. He set out to carve a bat to Jackson's specifications. He used the hickory on the north side of the tree in order to make it the hardest wood possible.
A whopper of a bat by any days standards. The bat was 36 inches long and weighed 40 ounces.
Knowing that Jackson was partial to black bats, Fergerson covered the bat with tobacco juice to stain it black.

Joe treated the bat like a child and called her 'Black Betsy'.
Jackson used Black Betsy a lot and told all who would listen about his bat. When Jackson felt 'overly appreciated' for his batting heroics, he would give Black Betsy most of the credit.
When he played in the minor leagues, fans would chant, "Give 'em Black Betsy!" prior to Joe stepping in the box.
In 1911, the bat cracked. Jackson felt that Black Betsy was irreplaceable. He couldn't throw her away.
He sent the bat to a manufacturer to have her fixed. From the moment he received the bat back, he used it almost exclusively and never broke it again.
In the 1930's, Jackson would claim Black Betsy had never been broke at all.

There were jokes that Jackson slept with Black Betsy. And that Jackson spent more time with Betsy than his wife, even during the off season. Shoeless Joe would laugh, knowing the ladder joke was probably true.
Jackson's professional career ended with the Black Sox scandal. Jackson took Black Betsy with him to non-professional games afterwards and kept Black Betsy with him till he died in 1951.
His wife died a few years later. She left Black Betsy in the will to her son. Her son kept Black Betsy on his bookcase for 40 years. Finally, he decided to sell Black Betsy. He offered her up in a 10 day auction on E Bay.
The winning bid was for $525,000.
The money paid for Black Betsy was not the highest amount ever paid for a bat. The bat Babe Ruth used to hit his first homer at the new Yankee Stadium was sold for over 1.2 million dollars.
Black Betsy has been re-sold since then and remains the most coveted handmade bat by collectors.