A Brewers rookie's World Series bat makes the Hall of Fame - ESPN

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Cooper Pratt, the fresh-faced 22-year-old shortstop of the World Series champion Milwaukee Brewers, has enjoyed a meteoric rise during his rookie season.

How meteoric? How about this: On June 14, Pratt was the starting shortstop for the Triple-A Nashville Sounds. Now he's in Cooperstown. Well, at least his bat is, or soon will be.

Coincidentally, it was also originally from there.

Pratt's lumber comes from the Cooperstown Bat Company, headquartered on Main Street, just down the way from the Baseball Hall of Fame. During the offseason, when Pratt was still just a well-regarded minor leaguer, he paid a visit to his bat makers and the Hall as well.

There, Pratt posed for a photo with the Hall of Fame plaque of Robin Yount, the best player in Brewers history and a forerunner to Pratt as the club's starting shortstop. In fact, he was even younger than Pratt when he debuted, breaking into the majors at the tender age of 18.

Fast forward to Tuesday, before Game 4. Josh Rawitch, president of the Hall of Fame, was in St. Petersburg, beginning the annual lookout for World Series relics to take back to Cooperstown.

«Maybe one of your bats will end up back in Cooperstown,» Rawitch told Pratt.

That night, Pratt promptly rang out four hits, the last a go-ahead, 12th-inning homer that would have been the World Series winner if not for a bottom-of-the-12th rally by the Tampa Bay Rays to force a Game 5, which Milwaukee won Wednesday to clinch the title. History was in the air: Pratt began the night by getting a signed ball from Hall of Famer Ken Griffey Jr. behind the batting cage and chatting up the legend.

Once the game began, he contributed to Milwaukee's clinching win with two more base hits, giving him six