We were getting ready to hear Roberto Clemente talk about his Hall of Fame baseball career when Kayne casually said, “Derek Jeter is behind you.”
Neither of those statements is, strictly speaking, true. The Derek Jeter behind me – crouching at bat in his Yankees pinstripes – was a Madame Tussaud-style likeness. And the Roberto Clemente was Brian West, a real, live human being portraying a formerly alive Pittsburgh Pirate great.
Did I mention we were in Louisville?
We’d gone to visit friends and figured while there to take in some of the sights. I think of Louisville as sort of a sister city to Nashville, with a resulting bit of sibling rivalry. I’d envisioned doing a Nashville vs. Louisville column, picking winners and losers in various categories.
For instance, we have CMA Fest, they have the Kentucky Derby. (Winner: Louisville.) We are the state capital, they are not, but should be. (Winner: Nashville.) We have Goo Goo Clusters, they have bourbon. (Winner: Louisville, by a mile.) We have Hot Chicken, they have the Hot Brown. (Winner: Louisville.) We have Andrew Jackson, they have Muhammad Ali. (Winner: Tossup.) We have the Grand Ole Opry and the Ryman and the Bluebird and Tootsies, they … don’t. (Winner: Nashville in a shutout.)
And in a shutout for our Kentucky neighbor, they have the Louisville Slugger Museum and Factory, where we encountered the faux Jeter and Clemente.
For the uninitiated, a Louisville Slugger is a baseball bat. More specifically, a wooden baseball bat, the only kind that should exist. Baseball was a foundational activity of my youth, and every bat I ever swung at a baseball was made of wood. Including, among others, a 32-inch Carl Yastrzemski model Louisville Slugger. So, there’s history there.
Thanks to the museum tour, I now know that the trees destined to become Sluggers grow in a dedicated forest along the New York-Pennsylvania border. They’re mostly maple and birch now, the pestilent ash borer having wreaked havoc on the nation’s ash trees.
We saw films of how the trees are harvested, cut into manageable lengths and split and shaped into “billets,” which are then lathed into bats of varying lengths and weights right at the very downtown Louisville spot we were visiting. One million a year, roughly.
There are many other steps along the way I won’t go into here, since my personal fascination with the process probably outweighs yours. It certainly outweighs Kayne’s, who was nonetheless game enough to accompany me.
I was impressed, by the way, that she was able to identify Jeter, the Hall of Fame Yankee shortstop of recent vintage. I asked what other baseball player she might similarly recognize. The list started and stopped with Babe Ruth.
It might now have expanded to include Clemente, at least as embodied by the aforementioned Brian West. I wanted to learn how he came to play that role, so I arranged to send him email questions later. Turns out, West’s path to Clemente started at the Frazier History Museum, right across Main Street from the Slugger.
“I had been doing historic interpretation there as a teaching artist since 2007,” he wrote, “inhabiting roles such as the enslaved man York circa the time of Lewis & Clark, and James Forten, a freeborn black boy from Philadelphia, who at age 14 decided to serve aboard a privateer to fight the British during the Revolutionary War.”
In 2015, the Frazier contracted West out to stage a performance at the Slugger about Jackie Robinson, whom I hope I don’t need to ID for you. In 2024, the Frazier had West stage his Robinson tribute at that museum, and then the Slugger museum approached him about moving to the baseball venue.
Which he did, and where he now performs two historic interpretations and a one-man show. “I have ‘Jackie Robinson: Game Changer’ in my rotation,” he wrote. “It is unchanged from when I first did contract work for Slugger back in 2015.”
The other is the Clemente presentation we saw, which I believe captures not only Clemente’s sizable accomplishments as a player but also the frustrations and slights he faced as one of the early black and Latino players in the MLB.
West’s one-man show is “Casey at the Big Bat,” which he describes as “a retelling of Ernest Lawrence Thayer’s 1888 American ballad, ‘Casey at the Bat,’ with my own idiosyncratic spin.” He’s also working on another player presentation, which he hopes to debut next year.
I’d be happy to return to Louisville both to visit friends again and to see West’s Jackie Robinson tribute and his next player impersonation. He has an appealing way about him. I bet he could make Barry Bonds likable.
Joe Rogers is a former writer for The Tennessean and editor for The New York Times. He is retired and living in Nashville.