WRITTEN BY DYLAN SAVAGEAU
Maine hardwood finds its way into countless products, from flooring and furniture to more distinctive items — like baseball bats. During the two seasons I worked at Dovetail Bat Company, I had a firsthand look at nearly every stage of the process. Tree-length logs arrived at the yard and passed through a series of transformations, being cut into 40-inch sections, shaped into billets, and eventually turned into the finished bats swung by major leaguers and little leaguers alike on fields all over the world.
There were only 10 people working at the company when I was there, including then-owners Paul and Theresa Lancisi. My job titles covered about as much ground as the shop itself: bat turner and lathe operator, wood cutter, billet maker, kiln operator, finisher, and tractor operator. In a small shop, you do whatever needs doing.
Dovetail Bat Company works primarily with three Maine hardwoods: rock maple, yellow birch, and white ash. Each has its own characteristics, but all three have to meet the same basic requirements. The grain needs to be straight, and the wood has to be free of defects that could compromise the durability of the finished bat.
But the process actually begins long before a log reaches the Dovetail yard.
“Foresters are the start of our extremely important supply chain,” explained Ben Chase, CEO of Dovetail Bat Company. “They decide which trees get harvested and how they’re handled. By the time a log reaches us in Shirley, its quality is largely fixed.”
Where the tree grew, how it was cut, and how it was handled afterward can all affect the yield and grade of the billets.
A bat log is a different product than a veneer log, saw log, or pulpwood, so getting the right material depends on the people making those decisions in the woods.
The logs are split before being sawn with a laser-guided system that follows the grain. The target is a grain slope of between zero and three degrees.
That number might not mean much to somebody walking through the shop. But it means plenty to the players using the bats.
A defect in the wrong place could send a piece of wood down a very different path. When I was there, the worst material was bundled and sold as firewood. Pieces that were sound enough for a bat but didn’t meet Major League or Minor League specifications would become tournament or batting-practice bats, sold at a lower price.
Chase put it this way: “A tree can be perfectly good lumber with a slight spiral or slope in the grain, but that same tree can produce a bat that breaks.”
Once the wood is cut and split, the next job is getting it through the kiln.
The wood is stacked between heavy metal plates and dried for 14 days. I remember those plates being heavy, hot, a pain to move, and loading and unloading them was some of the more physically demanding work in the shop’s process.
After drying, the wood is turned into cylindrical billets, then graded, weighed, and stored in a climate-controlled room. At that point, a piece of Maine hardwood has become the raw material for a baseball bat.
Once a billet is ready, a high-tech CNC machine cuts the initial outline of the bat. From there, we would take over at the lathe, measuring the entire profile and sanding the bat down to the exact specifications for a particular model or player. Every bat has its own dimensions, and getting those measurements right was critical to producing a bat that met the required specifications.
The final steps included sanding and a traditional bone-rubbed process. Rubbing the barrel with a bone compresses the wood’s pores, helping to harden the surface before the bat moves on to the finishing stages.
All of the bats we made were built to professional-quality standards, but Major League Baseball had additional requirements. Grain straightness, barrel size, and paint specifications were more exacting at the Major League level.
That extra scrutiny makes sense. A baseball bat has a pretty demanding job. It has to take repeated, hard contact from some of the faster throws and strongest swings in the game without failing.
By the time I was working there, Dovetail bats were already being used by Major League players. The company made its MLB debut in 2014 with the pennant-winning Kansas City Royals, and Pete Alonso used Dovetail bats during his record-setting 2019 rookie season with the New York Mets.
That season gave me one of the strangest experiences of working at Dovetail Bat Company. I watched Alonso use one of our bats in the 2019 Home Run Derby and more in the All-Star Game, and watched Jeff McNeil swing a Dovetail in the All-Star Game as well. Alonso went on to win the Derby and was named National League Rookie of the Year while also leading the MLB in home runs with 53 that season, breaking the all-time rookie home run record.
I had watched those bats being made in a shop in Shirley, Maine. And then they were on national television.
I started watching a lot more baseball while I worked at Dovetail because I wanted to see how many of our bats I could spot. Teams I never thought I’d give my time to started becoming a blast to watch. Growing up a Red Sox fan, I started paying attention to the whole league. It also made the connection between baseball and Maine’s working forest pretty hard to miss.
Maine is a forest state, with trees covering nearly 90 percent of its land. A 2024 analysis estimated that the forest products industry contributes $8.3 billion to the state’s economy and supports more than 29,000 jobs.
Most people probably think of Maine forest products as lumber, paper, pulp, or firewood. A baseball bat is a much more specialized product, but the basic idea is the same: take a resource grown in the working forest and add value to it through skilled labor and manufacturing.
Maple, birch, and ash each have their own characteristics. The differences aren’t necessarily obvious to somebody walking through the shop. After enough time around the wood, though, you learn what you’re looking at.
You learn to notice grain. You learn to spot defects. You learn that a piece of wood can look perfectly good and still not be the right piece of wood for a baseball bat. Eventually, you start looking at trees a little differently.
A section of Maine hardwood can become a billet, then a piece of sporting equipment used by a player in front of millions of people around the world. That’s a long way to travel for a tree.
I still think about the logs coming into the yard, the heat coming off the kiln plates, the noise of the lathe even through my headphones, and the rows of finished bats waiting to leave Shirley.
Most of the work was physical, repetitive, and truthfully, pretty damn hard. But there was also something satisfying about knowing exactly where the raw material came from and what it was going to become.
We were taking some of Maine’s most familiar raw material and turning it into a highly specialized product that could compete at the highest level of the sport.
Not bad for a little shop in Shirley, Maine.