For local bat craftsman, it’s about being ‘the best’
NORRISTOWN » As rain washes the August morning into a relentless gray, the floor of the Norristown warehouse appears to be covered in a light coating of off-color snow.
Three craftsmen labor away at hand lathes, illuminated by a light source. Toward the back of the warehouse floor looms a hulking beige machine, a rare intrusion of mechanization to the homespun premises. Along one wall runs shelves heaving with wooden billets, stacked lengthwise. Another wall is adorned by two-tiered circular bat racks, suspending by the handle hundreds of templates marked with exacting notation. The smell of sawdust and paint intermingle in an acrid aroma.
Hovering over the action, usually engrossed in a printout or the object whose creation it outlines, is David Chandler, whose name graces the building. At first glance, Chandler may not look like someone who texts Bryce Harper or Aaron Judge as often as you do a family member. Or that his phone, which scarcely goes 10 minutes without ringing, reads like a who’s who of baseball. Or that from this humble outpost, a squat brick building that appears to be crouching to hide behind a block of rowhomes, Chandler isn’t aiming to reshape baseball, yet in his way, is doing more than a little bit of that.
As the market for highend bats has transformed in the last decade, Chandler’s products have carved out an impressive niche, cradled in the hands of six to eight percent of big-league hitters. He’s achieved that prevalence without exclusive contracts or expensive marketing, just via word of mouth and a product that wins adherents and has helped Chandler weather the internal storms of a start-up life.
A furniture designer who turned an abiding love for baseball into a craft, Chandler has executed his vision at a scale of around 20,000 bats per year, all handcarved and polished to rigorous standards. And he’s done so with the unflinching affect of a small-town craftsman, despite an office rolodex that accounts for a billion or so dollars in MLB contracts.
His goal remains simple.
“We aren’t out to be the biggest bat manufacturer in the world,” he says, “just the best.” elegantly
Raul Ibanez appreciated Chandler’s help in drawing a crowd.
Ibanez was 40 years old in spring training with the New York Yankees in 2012. He was taking hacks in the cage at the Yankees complex one day when players were drawn to the sound of his bat. To seasoned pros, the ball sounded different off Ibanez’s bat, a resounding, sharp crack, not the “wet newspaper” sound hitters dread. That started a shop conversation about what made the stick in his hands so special.
The first answer is simple: Chandler bats are harder and more durable. Ninety-seven percent of the bats produced in the Norristown facility are made of maple, which comprises a significant share of bats in major league stadiums. In his season with the Yankees, when Ibanez hit .240 with 19 home runs and garnered MVP votes, he used the same Chandler bat for batting practice from spring training through the playoffs.
Not the same
No dents, no nicks.
“I’ve never seen a Chandler bat actually dent, which is just incredible,” said Ibanez, also a former Phillie who is now a special assistant to Dodgers President of Baseball Operations Andrew Freidman. “There’s no indentation of the ball.”
The second answer is more complex, requiring a dive into Chandler’s past and a primer on the lineage of baseball bats.
Chandler attended design school in Chicago and designed furniture in North Carolina, predominantly high-quality, lowquantity custom productions. His experience ran the gamut, from 18th- and 19th-century-style classical reproductions to contemporary creations, usually collaborating with design firms. The selling point was bench-made, heirloom quality pieces in a variety of species of wood.
One happened to be maple, which burst onto the Major League Baseball scene, then started bursting at the seams.
Until the late 1990s, every big-league bat for a half-century likely shared two commonalities: It was made of northern white ash, and it was manufactured by one of three companies, most likely Louisville Slugger or Rawlings.
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Then a guy with rippling, lab-created musculature named Barry Bonds started massacring baseballs with a maple bat, which debuted to no fanfare around 1996. Disciples flocked to the bats, which promised more efficient transfer of power. The baseball world jumped on board: Maple fills roughly 70 percent of big-league bat racks now, with ash relegated to 20 or so.
Sensing this growth opportunity, MLB opened the doors to competition by increasing the number of certified bat makers. In 1993, they numbered five. Now, it’s a group numbering in the low 30s.
For its benefits, maple carries one unforgiving downside. Chandler’s erudite description could fill pages, but here’s the short version for non-woodworkers: In ash, the angle of edge grain is paramount; in maple, it’s all about the face grain.
Ash’s relative softness means that when it breaks, it tends to absorb the energy, sending off small splinters and dissipating shock via vibration though the bat. Ash degrades with repeated strikes to its face grain, which is where manufacturers affix labels to encourage hitting with edge grain. Maple, though, is stiffer with a lower impact bending value when contact is made with the face grain. Its durability owes to even compression along a uniformly porous surface.
The combination of new makers and new technology precipitated problems, and around 2008, maple bats started splitting into dangerous shards at a rate of about one per game, leading to injuries. The problem was ash bat manufacturers applying the same logic to maple, overlooking subtle differences in medium.
Chandler recognized this from outside the orbit of pro baseball. And in 2009, when his wife, surgeon Julie Moldenhauer, joined Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and Chandler plotted a career change, he took the risk. It checked all the boxes. Before him lay an expanding marketplace. He had the logistical ease of proximity to supply lines: Much of his maple is sourced from the Northeast and specifically Pennsylvania, where several boutique bat-makers are rooted. And he believed in a core mission of creating a better and safer product than what he saw detonating in big-leaguers hands on TV.
“I thought I could do better,” Chandler said. “And I really didn’t want to be in that situation where … I’m at home on the couch and watching a home run derby or something of that nature and you think to yourself, ‘oh, I could’ve done that.’ I figured, I’m not going to allow myself to be in that situation. I’ll do what I know I’m capable of doing and I’ll see where the chips fall.”
Chandler’s bats are made to exacting standards that dwarfed existing products, alleviating the peril of maple missiles while harnessing the wood’s aesthetic beauty and catapulting potential. An MLB study in 2008 found fractured implements bearing up to a 14-degree angle in the face grain. The steeper the grain, the greater fragility along that fault line. Chandler bats don’t leave the factory at anything steeper than 1.2 degrees, with the objective
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