33 Elite Professional Grade Wood Bat
baseball memorabilia, sporting goodsWhile I have a plastic bin of baseball memorabilia mostly of the New York Yankees and Seattle Mariners camouflaged underneath racks of dress shirts and jackets hanging in my bedroom closet, this is not my favorite sport, anymore. For the first 13 years of my life, I lived and breathed baseball. With my weekly allowance money from mowing the grass, pulling weeds and splitting wood in the winter I bought hometown baseball memorabilia when not practicing on the little league mound. Then like many other teens my outdoors sports interests went elsewhere. In my case, towards the pigskin. I never collected to much football memorabilia but to this day, it is one of my favorite organized sports.

As an ode to the good old days catching pop flies and throwing a baseball around the horn, I started planning a weekend homerun derby with a group of local friends. There are plenty of school and park baseball fields around where we live so that won’t be a problem. What was a problem until recently was not having a glove, bat or balls. I have since found out my roommate has three mitts from when he played in high school. As for the bat, Olis Outdoors, a sporting goods retailer at http://www.route66megamall.com/ had an official wooden bat crafted by the Pennsylvanian Amish called the 33 Elite Professional Grade Wood Bat seen in the picture above. If we can’t knock the laces off a few balls swinging this stick, baseball should be left alone.

Using real balls and being grown men, I don’t think an aluminum bat would be such a good idea. Wood bats are heavier and harder to knock the ball over the right field fence. Being that we don’t have that many people, five, who are around to play the homerun derby this weekend, we need buckets of balls.

I am turning to Olis Outdoors sporting goods for the baseballs too. It is going to be very interesting to see if this old slugger still has it. In all honesty, I hope the years away from baseball memorabilia have gotten me better at hitting the ball because back in the day there was a reason I was near the bottom of the batting line up. As long as I at least hit one ball yammy I’ll be happy. A couple of the guys coming out on Sunday did play softball through their companies in the latter part of 2009 so they are already warm and ready to go. Batter’s up.