I love this story. Absolutely love it. It demonstrates everything that's wrong or right or both with the incremental changes that technology introduces into a sport like baseball.

Louisville Slugger keeps the specifications on all the models of bats it has made dating back to the early '30s and has reference models of many bats from before that. Informed of this, I asked the company if it would produce several replica bats so that I could bring them to a big-league game and let current players test them during batting practice. A couple of weeks later, a shipment arrived on my doorstep containing exact replicas of bats originally made for Honus Wagner, "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth.

I couldn't have been more excited if the Smithsonian had mailed me the U.S. Constitution. After all, how many batting titles did James Madison win?

There are two main things you notice when you pick up these bats. One, they're big. The Ruth and Shoeless Joe bats are 36 inches long and weigh 38-40 ounces, depending on whose scale you trust. Next, with the exception of the Ruth bat, the handles are much thicker than modern bats. Scott Spiezio measured the Shoeless Joe bat against his own and found that Jackson's handle was almost as thick as his is at the trademark. There are Hickory Farms beef sticks that are thinner. The Cobb and Wagner bats also have almost no knobs.

How the hell did they swing these things without steroids? These are not so much bats as clubs.