By Michael Cisneros

For DeMarini Marketing Manager Jerry Garnett, the 2008 Juggernaut reminds him of 1993.
Not because of anything to do with the bat itself – the new Juggernaut uses materials, designs and technologies that weren’t dreamt of 15 years ago. It just gives him a similar feeling of excitement and potential.

1993 was the year DeMarini - company founder Ray DeMarini that is - unveiled the first Doublewall aluminum softball bat at a home run-hitting contest at the USSSA Major NIT in Oregon. Steele’s was there, as was Lighthouse/Worth. Garnett, already working with Ray, was playing for Lab-Tech/DeMarini. “I was as tall as anyone there, but nowhere near as big,” he remembered. “But as I was making my way through the competition, people were starting to notice (the bat). Many of the others in that contest were using titanium bats – those weren’t banned until after that event … we were able to show what our bat could do for your average Joe and the word that came out of that weekend spread across softball about this little company in Hillsboro, Oregon, and what (we) were doing.

“I think that’s what we’ve got now.”

For the DeMarini faithful, the feeling could be ‘it’s about time.’ Throughout the 1990s, DeMarini was the little company that could, producing the most popular slow pitch bats in the game. But a series of events – the sale of DeMarini to Wilson Sports in 2000, the death of visionary Ray in 2001 and the explosion of 100% composite bats in 2002 – changed the landscape. On top of that, DeMarini/Wilson began a concentrated effort to make an impact in baseball, a push that has been wildly successful as evidenced by the company’s involvement in the Little League World Series and NCAA baseball.
“When you are a small company you really have to focus all of your resources on one project in order to really do it right,” said Garnett. “It’s that Insane Dedication that is more than just a motto; it is what we live by.”

“Our success in baseball did come with a price. At the same time we were growing our baseball business we started seeing our slow pitch numbers decline. Some of it was product-related. And some of it was that our core customers were very disappointed that we had taken our eye off of them. For 10 years we had been the little guys beating the big guys in the slowpitch world. They felt that we had sold out. I thought that was interesting. It was tough to hear, but it was also absolutely not the case.”
 
Ray knew in order to grow the company he would need to associate with people who knew better than he how to do it. “Wilson had everything,” said Garnett. “That’s why he chose them over multiple other offers. They had the business expertise, they had the distribution in place, they had the right attitude toward the product and that was real important to him. He did not want DeMarini to be a flash in the pan and for a company to come in and take the name and dismantle the original company.

“One of the last things he said to me was he felt he had done the right thing going with Wilson because they were going to leave the company intact, and often (in a buy-out) that is not the case.”

Not one DeMarini employee lost their job during the transition. DeMarini/Wilson began to grow its baseball and fastpitch lines. But what was lost was the company’s hold on the slow pitch scene.

“There are people in our building who have not experienced DeMarini as a leader in slow pitch,” said Garnett. “There is a new generation of players, 20-year-olds playing slow pitch, which has never had a reason to use our bats. I’m thinking wait a minute; we still know a thing or two about making high performance bat!”

The Juggernaut is the bat DeMarini believes will attract that new generation of players.

DeMarini excelled in aluminum bat construction, but was late to develop a competitive composite line. “Knowing we were late to the party, we wanted to do it in a way that would separate us from the others,” said Garnett. “That led to a real slow pace (in development) because it was difficult. There was a lot of trial and error.”

It started with the Evo line, first the yellow then the silver and finally the red Evo AX, the latter being the bat Garnett says began to bring people back around. Then in 2007 DeMarini introduced the Juice, a Stacked Composite Half & Half design truly unique on the landscape: a four-walled barrel with proprietary a very unique non-adhesive material between each wall, a stiff handle, and heavy end-weighting.

“The Juice,” said Garnett, “a lot of people will tell you it works, but also that it is not a bat for everybody. Part of that is (the Juice) was a response to the softer ball that many directors and leagues are using … What we underappreciated was the fact that ballplayers today are really affected by weigh and balance. If you take just one ounce and move it to the end of the bat it can turn a bat into something that your base hitter and slap hitters can not effectively use. The first thing a big guy will tell you is that he wants the weight moved to the end, but if you do that, then you really have to generate bat earlier in your swing and not everybody can do that.”

The DeMarini R&D spent a year-and-a-half talking to players and listening to what they wanted. The result was the Juice. That bat taught them a few things,
“I’ll tell you one thing,” he said. “When you make the bat that players think they want, many of them can’t handle the weight.”
But DeMarini didn’t give up on the design and used everything they learned from it in the Juggernaut.
 

The Stacked design allows them to play with the number of walls to achieve different results. “You can’t make one bat for every player,” said Garnett. “But Stacked technology allows us to come close. If you are strong enough to flex all the walls when you hit the ball, you will get all the performance. A rec-level player may not get full deflection with his swing, but if he can flex some of the walls than he/she will still get good performance out of the design.”
“One of the biggest reason for our stacked design success is what goes on in between the walls; very little friction. Our industry leading designs now allow for us to have the same wide sweet spot feel and performance that we introduced to the world over a decade ago.” It is a similar practice that DeMarini patented with its aluminum Doublewall Distance, but Garnett says is perhaps more important in composite construction. “Composite is a very dry material on its own,” he said. “It is a cloth-like material infused with resin (glue); when the bare walls rub up against each other it creates a galling effect that severely limits the performance of the barrel and creates a small/stiff feeling sweet spot.” DeMarini has learned that the amount of deflection depends on what happens between those walls, and their proprietary process is the key.

The Clutch end cap developed during the Juice project is designed to tune the Juggernaut’s Stacked walls and allow for maximum hoop (barrel flex) then return that energy to the barrel to launch the ball. The light weight flex tuned handle returns energy to the barrel and allows DeMarini to best distribute the weight to areas of the bat that help the player rather than hinder their swing.

The result – the Juggernaut – is getting noticed.

“People are recognizing the performance,” said Garnett. “It is more than we expected and everything we hoped for. We’ve actually got a situation right now where we physically cannot make enough bats for the orders; there is not enough time, not enough material.
“Of course, ballplayers don’t care about the rest of it. They just want something that makes them look good, that compliments their abilities. I’m very happy about where we are now and how we are set up for the future.”

DeMarini is going back after slow pitch with the same effort it used to capture such a large share of the baseball market. The company fought its way through development and the changing landscape and has, as Garnett says, “got all our ducks in a row.”
“We’ve got some people at the highest levels of our company excited about our future in slowpitch and we now have the resources to make things happen at a very high level. We are going to go harder, faster & smarter after the things that we want.

“We have opened a new chat board on demarini.com for people to exchange information and we invite people to be open and honest with us.”
The Juggernaut, its technology and even the message board are all designed to return DeMarini to the top.
“I don’t believe it should take too long,” said Garnett. “We are working harder, faster & smarter than we ever have; this is going to be another very exciting time for us!”