The Willy Wonka of the music world, Jack White, can now add another creative endeavor to his jobs list — baseball bats. White has teamed up with Detroit Tigers second baseman Ian Kinsler and former minor leaguer Ben Jenkins as a co-investor and co-partner at the sporting goods company Warstic. The independent company is known for creating wood and metal bats for both baseball and softball.
It should come as no surprise that White would want to join a baseball bat company (especially one with Detroit’s Ian Kinsler). White has always been a very big baseball fan (no, seriously, he loves baseball), even going as far as thanking the Detroit Tigers players and coaches in his liner notes for his second solo album Lazaretto.
In the press release, White described working with Warstic as having “a lot of room to explore aesthetic ideas in just baseball alone that can bring beauty and purpose to the weapons that athletes use to accomplish their goals.” White’s full statement can be found below:
I discovered the Warstic company through my love of design….I was drawn to what Ben Jenkins was doing at Warstic by the simplicity and harshness of the designs. Most baseball bats and equipment in the sports world do not impress me much, but I think that there is a lot of room to explore aesthetic ideas in just baseball alone that can bring beauty and purpose to the weapons that athletes use to accomplish their goals. This can be accomplished not only through form following function, but also to bring in outsider ideas into the zone of athletics steeped in history and sometimes bogged down by its own weight. Warstic is incredibly inspiring to me in this fashion, and I think we can make beautiful objects for not only professionals, but also young children just beginning to understand how important the tools of the trade are to their passion for competition.
No word yet if White will be creating a special Third Man Records bat consisting of the label’s black/white/yellow color scheme.
(via Stereogum)
