'That was pretty special': YouTube star Baseball Bat Bros launches baseballs at SRP Park

Baseballs were flying in SRP Park earlier this summer, but it wasn’t the Augusta GreenJackets leaving the yard.

Will Taylor, creator of the popular YouTube channel, The Baseball Bat Bros, made a visit to the North Augusta ballpark back in May. He films review of baseball bats and other content around the sport and currently boasts over 600,000 subscribers (about half the population of Hawaii) on the platform.

This video, in particular, was a comparison of wood bat performance at different price categories. What started on local high school fields around his native Portland, OR, has turned into a nationwide adventure to ballparks of every level.

“Way back in 2019 when we started all this, we literally hopped fences to film. It’s pretty funny because we’ve come a long way,” Taylor said. “We actually have a contact at MLB and he hooked us up previously with the Round Rock Express and he knows a guy at the GreenJackets and got back to us right away. They were more than happy to have us and met us there, Augusta was on the road that day and the field was wide open and they let us have it for a couple hours.”

Taylor found his way to North Augusta by way of his younger brother, John, an infielder for the University of Louisiana.

“This spring, all I did was follow my little brother around to watch his games. Their last regular-season series of the year was at Georgia Southern in Statesboro. We asked the Georgia Southern players, ‘What was the best field anywhere near here,’ and they said driving up to Augusta was our best bet.”

The Eagles are regulars at SRP, having played midweek games there just about every season since the park opened in 2018. While he visited in May, the video was published June 27.

Prior to his stops and Georgia and South Carolina, Taylor has filmed batting practice sessions in Kaufman Stadium (Kansas City Royals), Chase Field (Arizona Diamondbacks), Minute Maid Park (Houston Astros) and dozens of minor league and college ballparks. It’s become somewhat of a symbiotic relationship between the organizations and the YouTuber.

“They just see it as a cool opportunity to show off the ballpark and, typically, it helps even more if their kids are a fan of the channel or something like that,” he said. “In that case, it’s a shoe-in. We try to be super respectful and not damage the field and I think it it’s been a win-win for the channel.”

How The Baseball Bat Bros YouTube channel came to be

Taylor was a high school prospect in the Class of 2011 before attending Utah as a catcher. As it turns out, it was his younger brother’s entrance into high school baseball that sparked his return to the game.

“I didn’t even, honestly, get a lot of playing time at the D-I level and called it a career after that. I was at peace with baseball for a while,” he said. “I was out of the game for probably four years and when my brother got to high school, I started working out with him and threw him BP (batting practice) every day. We’d go out to his local high school field and eventually, when he got good enough to throw respectable BP, I said, ‘Hey, can you throw me a few?’ I wasn’t great, but I was a little bit impressed with how good the swing still was.”

After the first video was posted, things took off like wildfire. Taylor discovered a void in the market that needed filling, much like another sport already had decades before.

“Golf is a great example. There’s an entire industry of equipment and what people think of it and how it’s priced,” he said. “With baseball, it’s almost embarrassing. There was nothing like that. I didn’t realize there was an appetite for reviews until we made one for fun in 2019. This was never an entrepreneurial endeavor. Immediately from the first video we posted, we had no subscribers and people still managed to find the video. We realized that even though there wasn’t content around bat reviews, people were searching for it.”

Reviewing products for an audience is never easy. When parents are spending up to $500 on a bat for high school or travel baseball, it’s that much more important that the person doing the reviewing doesn’t have skin in the game. It’s one thing for a bat company representative to say something, but a former player with zero ties to the manufacturer carries that much more weight.

“What was really important to us was that, and this is the core philosophy of the channel, is there was somebody outside of being directly affiliated with the bat industry reviewing bats,” Taylor said. YouTube has enabled us to do this independently.”

Potential for broken glass

Anyone familiar Taylor's videos knows the occasional rooftop or car isn't always safe during a batting practice session. The iconic 'The Clubhouse' apartment building just past the left field wall at SRP is no exception.

At one point during the video, Taylor sends a baseball into the balcony of one of the apartments. The couple inside comes out to their porch to the sound of Taylor apologizing. As it turns out, the couple connected with him via social media afterward.

“What was so funny is on Instagram and TikTok, the people whose window we hit found the post and commented on it," he said. "They were cool about it and came out to watch us for the rest of the round. That was pretty special.”

This article originally appeared on Augusta Chronicle: 'That was pretty special': YouTube star Baseball Bat Bros launches baseballs at SRP Park