DeMarini The Goods BBCOR · 2027An obsession
you can swing.

According to DeMarini’s historical account of Ray and the company, Ray’s enthusiasm took hold while playing on a company softball team at forty. He became a serious student of hitting, then appeared in instructional videos built around his approach. The story starts with somebody wanting to get better at a thing he enjoyed.

That beginning appeals to me. We love a childhood-prodigy story, but there is something particularly encouraging about an adult discovering an interest with enough force to rearrange the rest of his life. By forty, most of us have developed fairly elaborate explanations for why we do things a certain way. Ray found a reason to go back to being curious.

Softball was a place to test that curiosity. Hitting gives you feedback that can be difficult to negotiate with. You may have an elegant explanation for your swing, but the ball has already delivered its opinion. It does not schedule a follow-up meeting or soften the wording because you worked hard on the presentation.

There is an excellent discipline in that. A person can enjoy the feeling of an idea and still need to find out whether it works. A hitter has to bring intention, movement, timing, and contact into the same brief event. Thinking helps, but the thinking eventually has to survive the swing.

The videos add another dimension. Explaining a skill to someone else means making parts of it visible that an experienced person may perform almost automatically. You have to notice the sequence. You have to decide what matters. You have to find language that another person can turn into action.

I see a useful connection between teaching and product development here. Both ask you to understand an experience closely enough to help somebody else have it. A teacher can change how a person approaches the task. A designer can change the tool in that person’s hands. Ray’s story moves through both kinds of work.

That is a stronger beginning for a company than a vague desire to participate in a market. There is a particular activity, a particular person, and a persistent question about how to do it better. The business grows out of attention.

A scale can tell you how much a bat weighs. It cannot, by that number alone, tell you how the bat will feel when it rotates. That distinction explains a great deal of the conversation around The Goods and its end-loaded character.

In Daniel Russell’s research-based explanation of swing weight, the central idea is the distribution of mass relative to the point of rotation. Physicists describe the resistance to changes in rotational motion as moment of inertia. Move mass farther from a pivot and that resistance generally increases. The ounces still count, but so does where they live.

You can recognize the idea without a sports laboratory. A hammer feels different when held close to its head than when held at the end of its handle. The object has not become heavier on a scale. Its relationship to your hand has changed. A rotating object asks you to pay attention to distance as well as mass.

End-loaded is a description of that distribution, not a promise that every person will hit farther. A hitter has to move the bat and deliver it to the right place at the right time. The appeal of an end-loaded design is inseparable from the person who likes and can manage that character.

I find this more interesting than declaring one number universally best. The same sport contains different bodies, different swings, and different preferences. A well-defined product can know the experience it is trying to offer without pretending that every player wants the same thing.

It also explains why the label’s drop weight is only part of the story. In the familiar baseball convention, a 33-inch bat labeled 30 ounces is a drop-three bat. That describes a length-and-weight relationship. It does not specify how the material has been distributed along the bat.

DeMarini’s own baseball guide treats length, weight, and swing weight as related considerations. That is sensible because a bat is meant to move. Describing it entirely at rest leaves out much of what the player is going to experience.

There is a pleasing business lesson hidden in the physics. A product’s headline measurement can be accurate and still be incomplete. Understanding the customer often means discovering which additional relationship makes the number useful. In this case, the relationship has a very literal shape.

BBCOR stands for Bat-Ball Coefficient of Restitution. It is part of how nonwood baseball-bat performance is evaluated for the high-school and college game. The Washington State University Sports Science Laboratory explains the controlled testing process and maintains a route to the approved-bat list.

The laboratory’s description of bat-performance measures identifies the BBCOR limit as 0.50. That number belongs to a collision measurement. It is not a star rating, a percentage of likely home runs, or a score telling you how well a particular player will hit.

The standard makes the design problem more interesting to me. If the task were simply to make any object launch a ball as fast as possible, an engineer could wander away from the sport itself. A baseball bat has to belong to baseball. It has to operate within the game’s framework while still giving players a distinctive experience.

That leaves meaningful work to do. Mass distribution, handling, durability, vibration, grip geometry, and the relationship among parts can all remain important within a performance boundary. A limit on one measured behavior does not make every permitted object feel identical.

Creative people know this situation well. A writer works within a form. A musician works within an instrument’s range. A designer works within dimensions, materials, budgets, and the person’s ability to use the result. Constraints are often what turn an interesting possibility into a focused piece of work.

The Goods is explicitly presented as a BBCOR model. Its identity belongs to that setting, rather than to every league that happens to play baseball. Before competition, the relevant association’s current rules and approved list remain the practical reference for the exact model and size.

What earns my attention is the effort inside those boundaries. The designer still has to make choices. The player still has to prefer the result. The sport still leaves room for an object to have character.

DeMarini joined Wilson in 2000. Ray died in 2001. The company’s subsequent hybrid milestones belong to the people who continued the work, not to a founder personally designing products decades after his lifetime.

That distinction makes the story stronger. A founder can give a company its first direction, but a lasting business needs others who can carry the work forward. At some point, the original person’s curiosity has to become a practical habit shared by people who bring their own knowledge to the task.

The 2027 bat is a good place to notice that continuity without turning it into mythology. There are current decisions here: which construction to retain, where to refine the grip, how to describe the intended feel, and how to bring the next version to players. Those choices belong to contemporary product development.

I admire companies that keep a recognizable point of view while allowing the work to move. A brand can become so protective of its past that it starts preserving a pose. The more useful inheritance is a willingness to look closely, make a decision, test it, and improve the experience.

Ray’s story gives that attitude a human face. The present product gives it a current form. You do not have to believe that every engineering decision is a direct continuation of something he once said to see the relationship between the two.

There is also a community around a bat that does not appear in a materials list. Coaches talk about it. Players develop preferences. A familiar model name can become part of a team’s everyday language. The object moves from factory specifications into stories people tell one another about a season.

That is one reason baseball equipment becomes so memorable. A bat is used in public, but its relationship with the hitter is personal. Other people see the swing and the result. The hitter feels the grip, the timing, the contact, and the confidence or uncertainty that comes before the next pitch.

Good product thinking takes that private experience seriously. It cannot control the entire game. It can pay close attention to the piece of the game a person is holding.