YouSaid · the spoken record

Kurt Ainsworth

lines on the record: 104
first: 2024-12-16
most recent: 2024-12-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“I can't take anymore, so I went and told the trainers, I said, Look, I can't go anymore. I got to have, I got to go see a doctor. So they flew me to Los Angeles and they did MRIs again. And the doctor said, man, the labrum rotator cove was all completely torn and it was laying down perfectly on the MRI. So we couldn't tell how bad it was. He goes, I can't believe you were throwing a baseball. And I was like, well, in one thing, it made me feel good that I knew something was really wrong. But in the other thing is I knew my career was over that day”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And now I'm in the National League, so I was hitting. So I really had better bats than our hitters. And it became pretty funny that you see hitters go up and take my bats to go out into the games. But I just, my first bullpen in spring training was great. And I just couldn't recover after that first bullpen no matter how good a shape I was in. It was super frustrating to me because I worked so hard. I mean, I was really throwing well. And then I just had that damage in my shoulder. And I knew it was coming. So, you know, I threw one game in a field and my wife was there and my kids were there. My family was there actually this game. And I walked over to them. I said, I'm glad y'all are here. And like, what do you mean? I said, well, that was the last time you'll ever see me throw. And they're like, whoa.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We did, and this was an upgraded bat. Our finishes got better that year, Jose Cruz Jr. and some of the other players started really gravitating toward the bats and really started buying into the company.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we're paying guys to help us sand bats, paint bats, engrave bats, ship bats at that time. We had help. So we were paying them and not ourselves. So anything we were making was going right back into the business to pay the employees and to buy more inventory because wood was expensive.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we weren't doing, and especially you have three partners, and you also have employees there every day. So we were paying.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, when the season ended, I was basically released. I was no longer under a contract, no team control. So I was a free agent. And so I was, I had no pay coming in. And I was trying out for teams. And started working out for teams that really that offseason, November, December throw-in, and then hopefully to get signed to go to spring training one more time to give it a run.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it depends on where you are. So if you're in the major leagues, you'll get your major league pay. If you're in the minor leagues, you'll get your minor league pay. And I had already been sent down that year, I think at that point, major league pay. And I had two kids at that point when I got home. Wow. Yeah. It was two kids not having the salary coming home, working for a company for free. It was definitely challenging times”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, and I think Joe and I were kind of at that point in time, we were thinking you could put it on anything and it would kind of add value, right? We weren't thinking just wood bats. Joe and I weren't at that time. We had always been thinking outside of wood of where could this take us down the road?”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it sounded better than Ainsworth Bat Company or Lawrence Bat Company. It has that designer feel to it. And I think that was probably our first really good decision we made is just keeping it as Maruchi Bat Company. It just has that Italian high-end feel to it.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was even better than that for us. We've never paid a player to swing a bat. And a lot of that was because we just couldn't afford to pay players. I'm going to be honest with you. But again, we were very fortunate that the Major League teams were actually buying the bats. So I would go to the players and say, hey, do you want to try these? We'll have the Clubhouse guy order them. And they were actually buying the bats.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, sure with some Hall of Famers on that team and some superstars, right? I mean, well, Sammy Sosa, Raphael Palmero, Brian Roberts. But yeah, to have those guys use it and validate the product, I think that is when we knew we were on to something.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that was a huge move for us. That was kind of one of the early ways the stars align for us, and the industry changed. Barry Bonds made maple popular. He came in and started hitting with maple and he was hitting all his home runs. And then Maple became more and more popular. And people looked into it. And maple's just a harder wood. And if you really show people, a player comes in, you could take a nail with a hammer and drive it right into an ash bat. You take that same nail and try to put it in a maple bat. It's going to bend the nail. And you show a hitter that and they're like, why wouldn't you use a harder bat? And so players started going to maple really quickly over Ash. And then the emerald ash beetle, the ash borer beetle, came in and kind of wiped out most of the ash in the United States. So then it really forced everybody into maple and we had a really big head start on the maple side. So that allowed us to gain market share pretty quickly.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we would do a lot of souvenir bats. We did a lot of graduation bats, birth bats, high school senior bats. And then the truth of it is that, you know, Joe and I would take off with one of our other employees, our first employee, who's still here to this day. Brett Laxton, he pitched in the big leagues as well. We would load up a trailer of all of our extra cut bats and we would drive to Alabama to men's senior baseball league tournament. This is 40-year-old older men up to like 65, and we would sell every bat at the tournament and come back with an empty trailer. And that kind of kept our business going.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's another lesson we learned earlier. didn't have an outlet. We didn't have any retail bats. We didn't have a whole lot out there. So our wood started building up and adding up. And you start looking at each piece of wood, let's just call it a $20 bill. It was a lot of $20 bills laying around. It made for some uncomfortable conversations when you would miscut a bat or miss sand a bat or misprint a bat. You're like, ooh, you just wasted a really good piece of wood.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And it's just the three of us, we weighed our bats down to the tenth of an ounce, which we still do to this day. And we wanted to be perfect. So when a player would order 12 bats from us, this is where it gets crazy is that we would send two. We'd send four. We'd send three. And the clubhouse guys would call us and be like, this is why we don't order from small bat companies. We ordered 12. You sent us two or three bats. We're like, well, hold on. We could send you 12, but all we had good wood for was two or three. And the phone would go silent and they go, what? Yeah, we could send you 12, but we only had that good wood. So I think players realized when they got our bats at the beginning, every bat was perfect.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In the MLB. Yeah, there's a lot of regulations, and it's changed over the year with MLB. And, you know, we adapt to those changes, but certain players want certain things. And you got to work with them to give them what they want. And, you know, of course, over the years, we're a little bit more sophisticated than we were back then. But the biggest thing for us is consistency.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back then, I was probably more like $65. It should have been a lot more than that with the amount of time and effort we put in, but I think they were like $65 when we started.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was, you know, basically you would take a model they liked, you would copy it, make it in RW, our finish, send it back to them. And the players really started liking the bats.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we used to bone every bat and we used to be in our logo until we had to take it off because it was an extra logo. They said at MLB. We used to say bone rubbed on our bats. We used to actually use a cow femur and compress the grains of the bat to make it a harder bat. So if you didn't compress it, you could have seam marks in your bat. And to us, that meant softer. So we were compressing every bat with a cow femur. Wow.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back then, I think it was probably a couple minutes to cut it, but then you got a couple minutes to sand it, then you got to stain it, let it dry, you know, then the engrave it. So, I mean, it took quite a bit of time. We weren't doing very many bats a day, I can tell you back then.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. Our neighbors thought we were kind of crazy, but they would come over and watch. And what was crazy is that, you know, Jack, after he'd be at football all day, then Jack would come over at night and cut bats late into the night on the lathe. And then Joe and I during the day, we would sandbats, stain bats, paint bats, engrave them, and ship them off to customers. We were kind of the sales operations. We actually made all the bats during the day. And Jack would cut at night.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“How was that working? Well, first things first, there was no real playbook to do it. So when we ordered the equipment, it all showed up at my house. I had built a shed in the backyard. We had a big CNC lathe. We had engraving machines. We had sanding machines. I mean, we went all out on equipment.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still an Oriel at that time and went back into spring training that next year and kind of Joe held down the business in Baton Rouge while I was there and we had a lot of really good players on the Orioles that year and I was bringing in bats.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And our lawyer left that meeting saying, Man, I hope my friends didn't just lose all their money in a bat company, right? So it didn't make sense at the time. And there was no playbook for what we wanted to do. And, you know, at that time, we really didn't even know where we were going to go with it. Is it just going to be Major League alone? Are we going to run camps, clinics, teams? But I tell you what we did commit to is making the best bats in the world and getting learning everything about the wood business.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And look, we had some money from the sign-in bonus for sure, but it was like, at some point, you're just going to continue to dip through that. Savings, right? So day to day money coming in was not matching what my spend was going out.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, rightfully so. He should have been skeptical, right? The Woodbat market at that time was small, it was tough, and it did take us a long time to do it. We told him that hey, we're committed to this, we're going to build a shed in my backyard. We're going to put in equipment. Joey and I are going to work this and sell it during the day. And we can do something with it. So Joe and I were willing to go sign our houses. We're willing to go mortgage our houses on all the equipment we brought into our house. And he finally did agree to it and trusted us. We built a great relationship.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we can't do that. There's no money in this. We're not going to make any money doing this. This is just kind of his hobby. And Joe and I really said, hey, we want to do this. We want to push this along.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We'd like to say a wood bat's the best training tool out there. If you can learn how to hit with a wooden bat and find the sweet spot on that, when you pick up your aluminum or your composite bat, you're going to be a better hitter.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, so it was just commonplace to use in a dozen bats and a player would go through them and they would do their own grading scale and they'd say, man, these three or four are perfect. I'm going to save these for game. I'm going to use these three or four for batting practice and the rest, I'm just going to sign and give away. And then you look player by player. I was a pitcher in the National League, so my wood wasn't as good as other people's would. And I'm sitting there like, man, they're walking guys to get to me. I should have the best bats. I'm in the major leagues. Why am I not getting good wood? You know, just looking at wood, whether it's the grains, whether there's knots in the wood, the weight, we would grade our bats. And again, pitchers bats were never high quality. And so we actually got together and said, we're going to start a bad company where every player in the major leagues get the best wood.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I don't think they were at that time, I'm going to be honest with you. I think we saw an opportunity. We saw that the other competitors in the space were sending out 12 bats to a player when they'd order a dozen players and only three or four of them would be good enough to use in a game”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They put a Marucci logo on it, so he had kind of created this on his own computer in his backyard, put some sticker on it, Maruchi Bad Company. So it was amazing. He had Eduardo use it. And then, believe it or not, Barry Larkin used it, Hall of Famer, and got a hit.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The reds at the time. And so he literally went there to bring him a bat just thinking he would take some batting practice with it. And next thing you know, Eduardo Prez used it in the game, in a major league game”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Correct. Yeah, and Jack had relationships from his days at Florida State. He was a trainer there first, and Edward O'Perez was a player at Florida State. And so he decided to make a bat for Eduardo Perez just for fun.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, he studied the industry and started making some pretty good bats. And it just how the stars aligned as, you know, his house is two streets away from mine at the time in Baton Rouge. And so Jack was just kind of whittling in his backyard. He had a Wuffleball field in his backyard for kids to go play. And really when Joe and I started seeing some of these bats, we're like, man, your knees not rehabbing very well. It's not coming back. My shoulder is not coming back very well. Let's think about what are we going to do now that our careers are coming to an end. Like we're going to keep trying to play, but if they come to an end, what are we going to do?”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, he was always tinkering with Wood. You know, he tried to make bats for his son in the neighborhood. His son's name was Gino in town. And he had called Louisville Slugger one day to make a youth bat, and they wouldn't do it. And so Jack said, well, I'm from Pennsylvania. I took wood shopping in high school. I'm going to make a wood bat for my son. And he did. And he made a wood bat for his son. And then he started making other bats at night. And he would bring them into the locker room for Joe to look at because he was a hitter. I was a pitcher, right? And Joe and I love baseball, so we'd like to look at the bats and talk about bats. And that's really where all these conversations started.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, yeah. And his best friend at the time was my roommate at Ella Shoe. So Joe and I developed a relationship when I was playing at Ella Shoe. So when I had a chance to come back, he's rehabbing his knee. I'm rehabbing my shoulder and Jack's our trainer.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, what a crazy story He's just an incredible athlete, obviously. He was Mr. Football or Mr. Baseball in Louisiana as well when he was coming out of high school the same year as I did in 1996.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, that's tough. You know, being injured is not fun. You feel like you're not really part of the team sometimes when you're in there and you're watching your other guys go through everything and you're there every day and you're rehabbing, but it's just not the same. It's just not. It was super frustrating to me because I worked so hard. And I think that's the one thing that bothered me. The harder I worked in baseball, the more injuries I had. You can only throw so much. You can only run and lift so much. And that was always, it really hurt me psychologically a lot. I just couldn't stay healthy.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was in 2004. So I reached out to the Orioles and said, would you let me go home to Baton Rouge, you know, Jack Marucci is the head trainer to LSU? Would you let me go home and Jack will write my reports and do my rehab? And the Orioles actually said yes. I was like, whoa. So I had to cold call Jack Marucci and say, I mean, he's a really cutting edge trainer and always has been. So I was like, hey, I want to go back and do my rehab there.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, we were in Chicago on a road Then I was like, well, I'm going to show them. I'm going to go to Baltimore and really be the pitcher that they didn't realize they had.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It could be different now. And that was just kind of back then. And the Wrigleyfield tunnels, I mean, I think we walked a half a mile to get to our locker room at this point. Oh, you were in Chicago.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. And so Dave Briggetti was our pitching coach at the time, comes and gets me out of the dugout. And we walk up this long tunnel at Wrigley Field. And he said, he and I had a great relationship. He said, you've been traded to Baltimore. And basically, I was like, can I go tell my teammates by? He said, no, you got to go change, take your jersey off. There's a car waiting for you and you're flying to Baltimore.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, this time was different. And they finally figured out after by 11 start that I had a broken shoulder blade. And it was tough, but I was still pitching well, so they were throwing me out there and I didn't want to come off the mound. I wanted to keep going. And then, of course, as I'm rehabbing, I get traded to the Oreoles that year.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, I wasn't. I moved up very fast. I had some really good chances, some opportunities early. I put so much pressure on myself. I'm be honest with you. I didn't really enjoy it along the way.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“That's correct. You know, when the Giants came up and selected me with the 24th pick, it was just a special moment, but I'll always remember for sure.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, it was a great season. It was really a whirlwind season and just seemed like I was getting better each week. My girlfriend and I got engaged going into that season, my wife now, which was kind of crazy going into that last year at LSU. And then, you know, throughout that season was kind of a whirlwind all the way through the regionals and super regionals until the draft.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Extraordinary pain. And I had some teammates on the team. They're like, man, come on, you got to suck it up. You got to go. You're throwing well. We need you to pitch for LSU next year. So I was like, all right, I can do this. And so I pitched the whole game and then my elbow just blew up. And it was.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah. So during that year, I trained, I threw, I felt okay. And then, you know, I had some elbow injuries and then went to summer ball. And in my first game in summer ball, I ended up throwing a full game, a complete game no hitter, but blew out my elbow.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I think when I was coming out, when you were hitting 90, you were probably a top prospect. Obviously, the speeds have changed along the way. And now it seems like you turn on the TV and most guys are throwing 95 to 100. It really is amazing to see these guys throw.”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think my mechanics were a little messed up, but I was probably somewhere in the, I would say, 82 to 87 or 88 range. So I was okay for a high school player”
2024-12-16 · How I Built This with Guy Raz · Marucci Sports - Kurt Ainsworth · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT