Tim Sullivan | Selling to the sluggers not easy

Jorge Posada could be a tough customer. Before the New York Yankees' persnickety catcher would wield a new baseball bat, he would weigh it.

He liked his Louisville Slugger P320M at 34½ inches, 32 ounces, and woe to the man who delivered something different.

"He would take the bats out and put them on a digital scale immediately," Chuck Schupp recalled. "He wouldn't swing it. He wouldn't look at the wood. And if it was off, he was unhappy."

In evaluating their equipment, ballplayers are as particular as pianists and more susceptible to slumps. They can be alternately demanding and desperate about the tools of their trade, and sometimes both in the space of a doubleheader. In 30 years as Louisville Slugger's director of professional baseball sales, Schupp's job was to resupply players and, if necessary, to reassure them.

"You have to be conscious of what's going on with the team," he said Thursday morning at the company's Main Street museum and factory. "And you're mindful of the player individually: Is he going good or going bad? My opening line (with struggling hitters) is, 'Guys, I'm here to change your luck.' "

Though he recently retired from cultivating professional clients for baseball's best-known bat company, the 59-year-old Schupp still speaks of his job in the present tense and with affection after logging more than a million airline miles as his company's big-league liaison.

With a sharp instinct for clubhouse culture developed as a pitcher at the University of Louisville and a minor leaguer in the Minnesota Twins' system, Schupp has helped Louisville Slugger retain meaningful market share in a business that now includes 38 manufacturers approved for the majors.

"When I started there were eight companies," Schupp said. "My job (was) to make this company visible from the big leagues ... to build a relationship with as many players as you could. Those relationships go a long way toward product loyalty."

But because bat deals amount to tip money for major league stars, that loyalty can be short-lived. Part of Schupp's routine was to study photographs on GettyImages.com to see what brand of bat players had been swinging the previous day. When he detected a player using a competing brand while contractually committed to Louisville Slugger, he would seek out the player and ask, discreetly, how Schupp had failed him.

When your job depends on celebrated athletes using your product, confrontation is not an option. Neither is impatience. Schupp says he spent 3½ years selling Justin Upton before the Atlanta outfielder finally bought in. Recognizing the futility of trying to fix the unbroken, Schupp deliberately kept a respectful distance from Los Angeles Angels star Mike Trout, who uses bats made by Old Hickory, a Tennessee company that dates only to 1999.

The field is so crowded, and the competition so fierce, that much of Schupp's job involved identifying prospects in spring training, in the Arizona Fall League and at the All-Star Futures game. He relied on old friends such as Yankees manager Joe Girardi and Arizona Diamondbacks general manager Kevin Towers for clues as to the Next Big Things — and on attentive service to sway them.

"I tell them, 'If you sign a deal with me, you're done dating, we're married,' " Schupp said. "No flipping around. No changing. If you're not ready to do that, then we need to revisit this some other time.' I've had that exact conversation many times. ...

"The biggest problem I have is I sign a guy and I tell our public-relations people, etc., about the next guy I've signed, and we start promoting him and you see him in the big leagues and he's not swinging the product. Then it comes back to me."

Given the progressive difficulty in climbing baseball's ladder, many of the players Schupp pursued never panned out. But the best of them — such as Craig Biggio, Derek Jeter and Cal Ripken Jr. — tend to stick with the same model for years on the understanding that their hits are a function of their swing rather than what they're swinging.

Some players will order one model for games and a heavier version for batting practice. Some prefer to use lighter bats late in the season as their aches accumulate. Former All-Star second baseman Bret Boone was so fussy about his bats, and discarded so many of them, that he eventually gave Schupp his credit card rather than have the costs billed to his club.

Schupp's best customer might have been Johnny Damon, a free-swinging outfielder famous for creating kindling.

"Four years in a row he broke the most bats in the big leagues," Schupp said. "Probably the worst year he ever had he broke 60. I don't know if that's because of his pitch selection or if there's a certain pitch he always liked that he couldn't handle."

On the opposite extreme is Seattle second baseman Nick Franklin, who swings a black D190 model as if it were facing extinction.

"I remember seeing him in a (July) interleague game in Cincinnati last year," Schupp said. "He'd used one bat. One. 'That's great, dude, but it kills my business.' "

Tim Sullivan can be reached at 502-582-4650 by email tsullivan@courier-journal.com and on Twitter @TimSullivan714.

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