Batter Up: Perfect bat takes the right wood, a fine eye and plenty of patience

How a major-league baseball bat is made:

1. Veneer-grade lumber is purchased already cut into rounded billets and dried to a moisture level of eight per cent. Although the billets arrive weighing between 4.9 and six pounds, they are individually reweighed to the thousandth of an ounce and sorted accordingly.

2. Each billet of wood is also graded visually to assess the slope of the grain before it is added to the appropriate shelf. Only the straightest grain wood can be used in the major leagues.

3. For Miguel Cabrera’s bat, Sam Bat’s director of pro production, Alfred Maione, typically will head to the shelf marked 5.400 pounds (though he could work with anything from 5.380 to 5.420). He’ll then pick up a billet, inspect it again with his eye to ensure the straightness of the grain and then place it in the wood tracer lathe, which has already been set up to replicate a template bat based on Cabrera’s exact specifications.

4. The wood tracer carves the billet into the general shape of the bat in about three or four minutes. The tracer machine must leave just enough weight for the bat to be sand- ed and painted and still come out exact to the specified ounce.

5. Maione will then use a pair of calipers to double-check the handle and the barrel meet Cabrera’s exact specifications: 2.55 inches in diameter for the barrel and 0.93 inches at the handle. Some players have the barrel of their bat “cupped,” which removes some of the weight while maintaining the shape. Cabrera doesn’t, so Maione just cuts off the extra pieces of wood at either end of the bat and weighs it, knowing that fractions of an ounce will come off in the sanding process and fractions more will be added in paint.

6. The bat is then sanded with a sanding lathe to smooth any rough edges and get it to the exact weight and proportions.

7. Another member of the staff conducts an ink-dot test — an MLB requirement to guard against breakage — using an eye-dropper to place a drop of ink about 12 inches up from the handle. The ink follows the wood grains like water through a channel and the test measures the straightness of the wood. Using a magnifying glass and a protractor, they check to make sure the ink’s path diverges no more than three degrees. If it diverges by more than three degrees, the bat is ineligible for Major League Baseball.

8. If the bat passes the ink-dot test, another staff member will smooth any microscopic scratches with a wheel machine to give the bat a uniform look.

9. The bat is painted to the player’s preference before the player’s name and model number are inscribed by laser and a decal of the Sam Bat logo is applied. A final coat of varnish is applied and the bat dries overnight.

10. On the following day, the bat is packed with a silica gel packet to ensure no other moisture weight is gained, slipped in a plastic sleeve and packaged with five other bats in a cardboard box to be Fed Ex’d to the team’s spring-training home.