If ever a city was proud to be associated with a colloquial verb, it is Louisville, Kentucky. The verb “to slug” applies pretty widely here, when you think about it. An attractive city of more than a million souls on the banks of the broad Ohio River (Indiana is on the other side), Louisville is the home town of Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, there is a fine tradition of bourbon manufacture (and presumably consumption) as well. Lots of slugging there, then.

But, above all, there is the “Louisville Slugger” of high renown, which I am sure you have heard of because everyone else seems to know all about it. I alone in the universe had no idea what it was. “Tell you what, Lynne,” they said on my arrival the other day, those nice well-informed chaps from The Times, “Why don't you go and look at the Louisville Slugger Museum downtown?”

“What a superb idea,” I replied, fatefully doing my usual “don't let them see you panic” thing of pretending I knew what in heaven's name they were talking about.

I cannot tell you how disappointed I was when I found out that the Louisville Slugger is a baseball bat. I had briefly envisaged a legendary local bourbon drinker, or at least a prohibition gangster with a famous anger-management problem. A Kentuckian golfer with a record of massive drives would have been more than acceptable in the circumstances, too.

But once I was in command of the dismal facts, I bravely consoled myself with the argument that, in many key respects, a museum devoted to 120 years of baseball-bat manufacture would probably (bear with me here) have a lot in common with the Keswick Pencil Museum, which happens to be my favourite museum anywhere.

After all, it's all about getting the right timber, yes? Then designing lathes, finding a use for the sawdust and finally attending to the branding. In the one case this branding may be about getting Babe Ruth to sign to the company for a hundred dollars (you can see a replica of his contract in the museum). In the other, it is coming up with the lovely name “Lakeland” and always putting the colours in the same order in the packets, starting with the yellow and the red.

To be frank, this is probably the hardest piece I have had to write for these pages. I am nearly crying as I sit here. I keep thinking I may have to sneak out and throw myself into that broad Ohio River (with no intention of reaching Indiana). Baseball bats? Believe me, buddy, even when presented with so much compelling evidence to the contrary, I still believe that when you've seen one, you've seen 'em all.

Yet this excellent little museum - where they give you a mini baseball bat as a souvenir - must be a veritable Mecca to millions and millions of fans around the world. A wall of little gold plaques shows all the great names of the sport (presumably) who signed up to the Slugger - with their signatures exactly as they were “burn-branded” into the bat.

A room is devoted to baseballs signed by an astonishing number of US Presidents. You can see a Ruth bat notched by him 21 times in 1927, representing an oddly random proportion of the 60 home runs that he hit in that particular year.

And if I mention Ruth again, incidentally, it is because I am dying here; dying. Joe DiMaggio I am cunningly keeping up my sleeve to wow you with later in the week.

It is interesting how no one involved in the promotion of the Louisville Slugger ever mentions the use of the baseball bat as a weapon of intimidation, but heigh-ho, you can't have everything. Anyway, the way they are made is that you start out with a long, cylindrical piece of northern ash or maple called a “billet” (which looks like a very big pencil).

Years ago they used other types of wood, such as hickory, beech and willow, but nowadays ash and maple are more or less equally popular. The billet is then turned on a lathe to exact, player-dictated specifications of weight, length, circumference and so on. A shape like an elongated milk bottle duly emerges in less than a minute, to be treated in flame (for hardening) and dipped in lacquer.

What more can I tell you? Well, as far as I could tell, the baseball bat is always - invariably - grasped at the thinner end, which is interesting. No Major League Baseball player in the history of the Louisville Slugger has asked for his bat to be designed the other way round.

Various bats were handed to the members of our little party on the tour, so that we could weigh them in our hands and look thoughtful: ones with “cupped” ends (slightly lighter); ones with black lacquer on; ones festooned with famous names that I didn't recognise.

I kept saying “Wow” and “Er, well, wow”, but I was not fooling anyone. It was interesting to know that the brand is always placed where the wood grain forms a point (the weakest place on the bat) and that this is the reason players keep the trademark facing skywards.

Was there something slightly lewd about weighing the heft of these various chaps and exclaiming at their length and loveliness, by the way? Ooh, let's not go there. Since baseball bats often snap dramatically from overuse, associations of a sexual nature are to be avoided.