Danny Luckett did some woodworking in high school. Other than that, his main qualification for a job that would help many major league hitters was simply saying yes to the man at the employment office.

“He said, ‘How do you feel about making baseball bats for a living?’” Luckett said last week. “I said, ‘Well, I need a job, so that sounds good to me.’ I’ve been here ever since.”

Luckett’s 46-year tenure as the longest-serving bat maker for Louisville Slugger came to an end Friday, when he retired. Few had as much direct impact on producing the tools of the game.

Luckett is believed to have made more than 2 million bats for Louisville Slugger, which was bought by Wilson Sporting Goods in March but will retain its name and continue to manufacture bats in Louisville, Kentucky. Luckett said he was retiring not because of the sale but because, with his 68th birthday approaching, it was time.

He takes decades of highlights with him, including Oct. 11, 1972. With the best-of-five National League Championship Series between Pittsburgh and Cincinnati tied, two games apiece, Luckett went to work for the Reds’ star catcher.

“Johnny Bench hit a home run in the bottom of the ninth to tie the game with a bat I had turned that morning,” Luckett said. “Our representative took it to Cincinnati in the afternoon and he used it in the game.”

The Reds went on to win the pennant. Some two decades later, Luckett said, he watched as Joe Carter used his bat for the homer that won the 1993 World Series for the Toronto Blue Jays.

The Carter bat, though, was not turned by hand. By then, the art of using a lathe to turn a bat was all but obsolete. A process that once took 15 minutes can now be done in 45 seconds with a computer numerical control lathe.

The technology is less romantic, to be sure, but it has greatly improved the craft. Because of imperfections in weight, the company once had to produce about 15 to 18 bats to get a dozen that fit a player’s order.

“With the computers that we have, unless something happens to the machine, all the bats are identical, and that’s what players want,” Luckett said. “They want all the bats to be consistently the same size and the same weight.”

Of all the clients he served, Luckett said, Tony Gwynn had perhaps the smallest bats, at 33 inches, 301⁄2 ounces. Gwynn, a Hall of Famer, liked the light bats because he could whip them through the strike zone so quickly. The heaviest bats, he said, were for the Willie Stargell-Dave Parker Pirates teams of the late 1970s.

“They wanted 37-inch bats, and they wanted 35, 36 ounces,” Luckett said. “They were called ‘the Lumber Company’ for good reason.”

The most popular model ever, he said, was the C271, originally made for the former outfielder Jose Cardenal. It had a thin handle and a medium-size barrel, and players liked its balance and durability. Luckett said the challenge in later years was to give players raised with aluminum bats the thin handles they wanted while staying within Major League Baseball’s specifications.

Luckett worked with clients like Hank Aaron and Cal Ripken Jr., and as recently as last winter he turned a bat by hand for the Miami Marlins’ Christian Yelich, who visited the factory. The last hand-turned bat Luckett knows was used in a game was by Craig Biggio, during one of the final games of his Hall of Fame career in 2007.

Biggio collected 3,060 hits in his career, but by the end, when he was 41, the bat might have been a bit tougher to get around.

“He went to Cincinnati and used it one time and he said, ‘The bat’s too heavy,’” Luckett said. “But it was the same bat he used all along.”