Photo by Josh P. Crotzer
Dan Wilson
Claim to fame: Owner of Dan Bats (danbats.com), a home-based baseball bat manufacturer in Fountain Inn that creates customized bats for both performance and display.
Around the horn: Dan Wilson and his wife, Erica, grew up in the Midwest and met at a small college in Indiana before making their way to the Upstate. A highly regarded knuckleball pitcher and cleanup hitter in high school, Wilson rejected Division I offers in favor of ministerial studies in college.
Full count: The couple have three young children, including a set of twins. Dan is also an Edward Jones financial advisor with an office in Laurens.
Chatter: “Any sport where a 33% success rate makes you an all-star is a really tough sport. Owning your own business is just as hard.”
Dan Wilson is a problem-solver who knows a thing or two about woodworking and baseball. So, when his bat kept busting during recreation league games, Wilson went to work creating a solution that could withstand his big swings.
His custom-made bat—sourced from wood grown in extremely cold climates and rubbed with a cow femur to compress the already dense grain—was not only a smashing success for him but soon became the preferred lumber for everyone who stepped to the plate with it.
“The first time I used it, it just sounded different,” says Wilson. “That’s when I knew I was on to something. Pretty soon, my teammates were using it and so were guys on the other teams.”
Wilson went from hand-crafting bats for league friends and fulfilling custom online requests, to buying out a precut bat manufacturer in New York, which provided the equipment and clients to fill larger orders and expand the business, Dan Bats. At his shop, which is next to their home in Fountain Inn, he crafts premium bats with just about any color or stain, flame-treatments and engravings.
While he still makes bats for the purpose of ripping a baseball across the diamond, most of the orders are now of the trophy variety.
“Wooden bats are a $300 million industry,” says Wilson. “Trophies and awards are a $3 billion industry. If you have a custom-made bat hanging in your office, it’s eye-catching. It’s a conversation starter.”
Wilson keeps swinging for the fences, helping to develop a bat with embedded sensors that can provide metrics to batters and coaches. The Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals tested prototypes during spring training.
“Baseball is all about data and analytics,” says Wilson. “With this technology, we can customize a bat to the individual player.”
It’s another problem Dan Wilson has solved with a good wood bat.