Customizing Baseball Bats – Zinger Bats Tips
One thing is for sure: you can’t customize a metal baseball bat. Yes, it’s evenly balanced, has a state-of-the-art handle wrap, bold colors, a large sweet spot, and is made from high-tech materials, but if you want a flared knob, a narrower handle, a heavier weight. barrel, or if you want to name your metal bat, forget it. You pay your $300 or more and take it or leave it. Would you hit better with it? According to the pro-metal organization “Don’t Take My Bat Away”, no. But many baseball experts know that’s not true. Metal bats are certainly more powerful than wooden ones. But that may be the only advantage they have over wooden ones. There are so many virtues to the experience of buying a wooden bat that mass-produced metal can feel like buying laundry detergent or frozen pizza.
Traditional wooden bats come in various sizes, shapes, types of wood, and colors. The discerning player can go online and have fun discovering the perfect specs for their next bat purchase. You can often request barrel and handle widths of up to thirty seconds of an inch, and can even laser etch your signature into your bat like the pros.
Xbat made a name for itself by providing options to customize colors, shapes, etc. furthermore, it allowed him to mark the bat with a signature or special name, even a flag. Now there are many companies that allow you to do almost anything to create your own bat. Some of the best website deals are run by Marucci, Xbat, Superior Bat Company, and Zinger Bats.
Zinger Bats, a relatively new up and coming bat company, offers a very simple variety of customization options to personalize bats. Zinger is located in Montreal, Canada, near the source of a large quantity of excellent maple. Company President Fred Leiberman prides himself on his company’s ability to deliver high-quality products exactly to his customers’ specifications. When Leiberman and his partner bought the company two years ago, the business came with a state-of-the-art computerized lathe made in Spain, valued at $160,000. They also purchased a $30,000 laser burner and some high-tech sanding equipment.
Zinger is dabbling these days with the pros. Several major league players swing to zinger rhythms, including Miguel Cabrera, Dan Uggla. Bobby Abreu, Carlos Pena and now even Jason Giambi. The zingers are also in the hands of numerous minor leaguers. And on the company’s website they list other great players who have asked for bats such as Barry Bonds, Vladimir Guerrero, Miguel Tejada, Sammy Sosa, Maglio Ordóñez and Khalil Greene.
Zinger Bat’s customization process is more basic and realistic than many of its competitors, but Leiberman wants his customers to know that the most important elements of bat-making are in their warranties. “Bat buyers should be careful,” he says. “There are many companies that let you choose the length of your bat, but they don’t guarantee the weights. The good companies always allow you to choose your weight, and somewhere on their websites they will tell you that the weights are guaranteed.”
In fact, bat connoisseurs (ie serious hitters) will tell you that if you order a dozen bats early in the season from companies that don’t guarantee weight, your bats can vary as much as three or four times. ounces to each other. “It’s all in the wood,” says Leiberman. “Only about a third of the wood tickets we buy are good enough for our professional bats.” In addition to guaranteeing weights, Zinger also allows its customers to choose lengths down to a half inch.
Another factor in your quest for bat excellence is whether the company you buy from makes its own bats or has an “Original Equipment Manufacturer” (OEM) that handles the manufacturing. There’s nothing wrong per se with a reseller, especially if he works closely with the OEM on specs and quality control, but Leiberman points out that the customer is still two steps away from the person turning the wood. “People need to ask that question when they go online, or even call the company: do you make the bats on site or does someone else send them to you to resell?”
