The Home Run Humidor
The first game of the World Series takes place on October 24, when the two best teams in baseball will begin their fight to claim the Commissioner’s Trophy, crafted by Tiffany & Co. Baseball fans who enjoy a good cigar now have an intriguing place in which to store them, the Home Run Humidor from Tampa-based J.C. Newman Cigar Co. It just shipped to retail shops.
Most humidors are rectangular, but the Home Run Humidor is shaped like baseball’s home plate, making it a pentagon. It’s a large piece, roughly 5 3/4 inches high, one foot wide and one foot deep from the tip of the point, as measured on the outside. The seven-sided-piece (when you count the top and bottom) has an intriguing shape and look, but what truly makes it unique is how it’s constructed.
The humidor is made in the United States by Jason LeGear of Milwaukee Humidor Co. He started with the barrels of bats, 99 of them, to be precise, made of maple, birch and beechwood, which he split lengthwise, then sliced into veneers.
“The 99 bats yielded approximately 2,500 pieces of veneer,” says LeGear. He used those veneers over a skeleton of medium-density fiberboard to craft the humidors, which are lined with Spanish cedar. (The bats all came from one team, but the name of the team has to remain undisclosed due to Major League Baseball trademark and licensing rules.) The main wood veneers are quite light in color, and are accented with darker veneers made of walnut meant to evoke the stitches found on a baseball.
The humidor is close to, but not quite, the size of an official MLB home plate, which is intentional, made to maximize the space inside for cigars. “Having it match the size of a home plate [would] allow only six inches of clearance on the sides for cigars and a lot of wasted space in that angle,” says LeGear. “The final product is significantly more user friendly. The design was engineered to maximize capacity while maintaining a footprint that is friendly to most cigar smokers, as well as retaining the recognizable, unique shape of a home plate."
You can see the humidor in this video:
Baseball is part of J.C. Newman’s roots. “My great-grandfather sponsored the Cleveland Indians 100 years ago,” says Drew Newman, talking about company founder Julius Caeser Newman. “From 1998 until stadium renovations removed it in 2018, we proudly sponsored the Tampa Bay Rays and operated a cigar lounge in their stadium.” The company even makes a cigar called Tampa Smokers named after the city’s first professional baseball team.
Only 50 were made, and each has a suggested retail price of $2,000. Every humidor comes with 20 Tampa Smokers Toro cigars, five Tampa Smokers Baseball Bat cigars (shaped like baseball bats), a Boveda humidification system and a plate-shaped certificate of authenticity signed by LeGear and Newman. Like the humidor, the cigars are made in the United States, rolled by hand in J.C. Newman’s historic El Reloj factory in Ybor City, Florida.
This wouldn’t be the first collaboration between J.C. Newman and LeGear. He also produced the All-Star Humidor in 2023, which is made of wood floor boards reclaimed from the 2011 NBA All-Star Game court.
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