The baseball bat is a brutish creation, a blunt instrument created to pummel a round ball. Never has anyone accused it of being some sort of technological marvel. It exists in almost the exact form it did when baseball first started a century and a half ago because even its earliest incarnations came pretty close to perfection.

View photos A closer look at what makes the Axe bat handle unique. (Courtesy of Baden Sports) More

Today's version looks about the same as it has for decades – maybe a little shorter and lighter, some with cupped barrels, all with the same round knob on the handle, save for a single bat of those used by the 750 major leaguers. It belongs to Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia, and the man who helped make it a reality sees a future where all bats share the same handle as another humble tool: the axe.

"I think it's only a matter of time before the axe-shaped handle is the standard," said Hugh Tompkins, the director of research and development for Baden Sports, a Seattle-area company that created the Axe Bat, which this year received permission from Major League Baseball for in-game use. "The round-handled bat will be like a rotary telephone."

The Axe Bat replaces the knob with an oval-shaped handle that tapers into a curved, angled bottom. While Jimmy Rollins' furtive and occasional use of an Axe Bat two years ago marked its debut in major league games, Pedroia has spent a month using it as his lone bat, and the results are promising: Over the 28 games since he switched, he is hitting .353/.386/.504. His 42 hits over the past month are tied for the fourth most in baseball. And it's all with a bat that grew out of a simple question: Why does the knob – the one piece of the bat known to hurt players, particularly those who grip it on the lower edge of the palm and put their hamate bones in danger – still exist when it imperils those it's supposed to help?

In 2006, a New Yorker named Steve Leinert obtained a patent on the axe handle for a baseball bat, a concept Ted Williams hit on decades earlier in his book "The Science of Hitting," in which he compared a baseball swing to that of an axe. "Try it for yourself," Williams wrote. "Get a bat and swing it against a telephone pole. I do this with doubting young Washington players. Where is the wrist position at point of impact? Square and unbroken, that's where, just as when you hit a tree with an ax."

The axe handle felt more comfortable to Leinert, and he shopped it around to manufacturers. He met rejection after rejection, companies frightened off by something so novel, until Baden, whose main products to that point were balls, fell in love with the Axe Bat and agreed to license it for 20 years starting in 2009.

"You put it in your hand, and it just fits," Baden CEO Michael Schindler said. "It's made for your hands. The old knob just isn't. If you mess with this for a while, the old knob starts to feel odd. There is no doubt in my mind it's a better product. When you have 150-plus years of tradition to buck, it just doesn't happen with the snap of a finger."

It took five years for MLB to climb onboard, and even now Baden isn't making the bats for Pedroia because it doesn't have a license from the league. Victus Sports, a small New Jersey-based company, produces the axe-handle bats for major league players, something Pedroia learned by happy accident.

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