Killer Bats?The debate over wood vs. aluminum. The first-base coach for the minor league Tulsa Drillers died last week after being struck in the head by a foul ball hit off a wood bat during a game in North Little Rock, Ark. The coach, 35-year-old Mike Coolbaugh, had played briefly in the majors in 2002 and 2003; he leaves a wife and two children. His death adds to the debate about dangers in baseball, which usually focuses on young players struck by balls hit off aluminum bats. Supporters of metal bats insist that debate is skewed. "Why is it when there's an injury from a ball hit from a non-wood bat, people blame the bat?" asks Jim Darby of Easton Sports, a leading bat manufacturer. "When there's an injury from a ball off a wood bat, people say that's part of the game."
Aluminum bats have been around since the 1970s; the debate has been around nearly that long. While they are not used in the pros, the bats have been approved by the National Collegiate Athletic Association and are basic equipment in all of amateur baseball. Their original attraction was economic: Good metal bats are three to four times the price of wood ones, but they are far more durable.
Metal's impact on the game itself soon demanded attention. The NCAA reports a near-continuous rise in scoring and home runs from 1974, when metal bats were first approved, until the historic 1998 season, when record highs were set in scoring, home runs, and earned-run averages for pitchers. An exclamation point was supplied in that year's College World Series championship, won by the University of Southern California over Arizona State, 21-14. "That was the match that lit the fire," says Ty Halpin, the NCAA's associate director for playing rules administration. "Something had changed to let offense get so far ahead of defense, and that was determined to be the baseball bat. After some research, we put in parameters about weight and length." Offense has declined since new regulations in the design of metal bats lessened their potency, though it has never returned to the pre-1974 level. Safety has now eclipsed concerns about too much scoring. "There is an acceptable level of risk in baseball, but that level is built round wood," says New York Councilman James Oddo, who co-sponsored a bill to ban metal bats in that city's high schools. "Playing baseball with these bats is more dangerous than playing with wood bats."
The City Council overrode Mayor Michael Bloomberg's veto of Mr. Oddo's bill. But the measure, which is scheduled go into effect in September, is headed for court this summer after a group of bat manufacturers, youth baseball organizations and parents of young ballplayers sued to block the ban. Another bill banning metal bats was passed out of committee in New Jersey in October 2006 and awaits action by the full Assembly; youth recreation leagues in the New Jersey towns of Montvale and Wyckoff have already banned metal bats. The entire state of North Dakota banned them in 2005 for players in grades 7 to 12. In Montana, which has no high-school baseball, Miles City banned them in its youth leagues. All the bans stress safety.
Opposed to any ban are the manufacturers of metal bats, and a long list of baseball organizations. All amateur baseball organizations stand by the safety of metal bats. Industry spokesmen point to the accidents that happen with wood bats but never make headlines.
"USA Baseball [the national governing body for amateur baseball] and all of its members study the game from a purity and safety aspect, and I haven't heard one of them say there is a problem," says Easton's Jim Darby. "So when a Jim Oddo says there is a safety problem, we say 'show us the data,' and he can't." Good research is indeed scarce. The only fatality figures comparing metal to wood bats come from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission. In 2002, it reported 17 deaths due to impact with a batted ball between 1991 and 2001. Of those, eight were known to involve nonwood bats and two to involve wood ones, but in the remaining seven cases the type of bat was unknown. That overall group, however, was dominated by players using metal bats--at least 90%, according to bat manufacturers. The report found there was "not sufficient" data to rule nonwood bats unsafe. A current study funded by the National Federation of State High School Associations examines wood and metal bat use in Illinois high schools; the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research is comparing college leagues using metal and those using wood. The earliest report is due this fall. But a close look at efforts to ban metal bats shows that research is rarely involved. Each campaign follows some particularly horrible incident. The New Jersey bill was drafted after Steven Domalewski, a 12-year-old pitcher from Wayne, was struck last June in the chest with a ball hit by a nonwood bat; he has yet to regain his ability to walk or talk. North Dakota passed its rule days after two players in the regional tournament were struck in the face by balls hit off metal bats. Councilman Oddo began campaigning against metal bats in 2002, after a 14-year-old Staten Island boy in his district was struck in the face. The passion driving the current efforts to reform youth baseball is palpable. It is on display every place a new rule or law is considered, as parents of killed or injured kids from around the country rally supporters. A strong advocate in New York was Debbie Patch of Miles City. Her son Brandon, a pitcher, was struck in the head by a ball hit with a metal bat and died in 2003. He was 18 years old. "You couldn't see the ball until it happened--it was absolutely horrible," Ms. Patch said in a recent phone call from her Montana home. "Everybody around me said, 'Oh, he's just got a concussion; he'll be OK.' But then he went into seizures, right there on the field, and I knew it wasn't good." Manufacturers insist metal bats are as safe as wood. They resist the ban, they say, because forcing kids to use wood bats--which the industry admits are heavier and therefore harder to use--will drive them from the game, and not because they make more money from metal bats, as Councilman Oddo charges. "If nonwood bats were banned across America tomorrow and everybody were forced to use wood, we might make more money because of all those broken bats," says Louisville Slugger's Rick Redman. His company makes about a million wood and nonwood bats a year, he says. And Mr. Redman claims that they all perform pretty much the same: "By regulations of the governing bodies, the performance of these bats is capped," he says, "and the nonmetal bats perform no greater than wood." The safety issue may be cloudy, but few in baseball believe that metal plays the same as wood. In this country of metal bats, some towns and leagues reject them because they prefer the brand of baseball that results from using wood bats, among them several college leagues in Division II and III, and at least one American Legion division in South Florida. "American Legion baseball was dead in Broward County," says Ron LaDuke, a Legion committee chairman, "and since we introduce wood bats four years ago we've gone from three teams to 11. High-school coaches like the way the bats play and kids say using wood bats makes them feel more like major leaguers."
Then there are those nine summer leagues from Cape Cod to California for college players. All play with wood bats, which are paid for by Major League Baseball so that scouts can better assess potential major league talent. To them, batting with wood and metal is that different.
"Some of these kids are in very good leagues--SEC, Pac 10--and they're hitting .400, and they come to the Cape Cod League and they struggle to hit .200," says Red Sox director of amateur scouting Jason McLeod. The difference is that a ball hit off most any part of a metal bat can produce a hit, while with a wood bat finding the "sweet spot" is more important. It even affects pitchers. "Right now, pitchers are so weary of coming in tight, because you can jam a hitter and he's still going to get the ball to the outfield, and there are a lot more flair hits, ground balls that come off the bat quicker because they come off the metal and scoot through the infield," Mr. McLeod says. It isn't a safety factor for Mr. McLeod and his colleagues. These scouts are just convinced that baseball is a different game with any bat but a wood one. Mr. Rozin writes about sports for The Wall Street Journal.
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