quote:Originally posted by rz1:Who can say they wouldn't leave the game? Years ago we had limited options? We did a lot of things differently years ago but does that mean we had the best way of doing it. Sometimes we sound like our grandpas. "I remember when....", "If you kids had to do things like we had to.....". Those were "their" good ol days. Why do kids today have to comply with our old standards. Were we right? Do things stop evolving because that's how we did it? I know I would have had many issues if what my dad thought was the way I had to do things. Baseball and life evolve, we are here to enjoy the ride , not control it. We're not playing, they are. Please remember that I am a wood advocate for safety purposes at older ages, but accross the board changes may be nothing more than us not letting go of a game we no longer play.
Maybe I’m just not getting your point. You seem to think that the difference is, today’s kids wouldn’t take the time nor have the ability to adapt to whatever they had for bats, and because of that they’d be more apt to leave the game.
To me that seems to say you’re one of the reasons people won’t even try to go back to wood because you’re afraid of something that has no basis in fact. Why do you think kids use the modern bats rather than wood?
Because they’re lighter and perform better? With a little bit of work and some lead tape, I can make a wood bat “feel” much lighter than a drop 11, but retain the higher mass, which should make it outperform metal.
I don’t believe safety is an issue. If it truly was, the insurance carriers would be the first ones to let everyone know the metal bats were less safe by raising the rates to the point where they couldn’t be afforded.
I know that in your heart you feel they are unsafe, but people who actually compute probabilities, which is what insurance companies do, don’t use feelings, they use mathematics, and usually Bayes Theorem. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bayes-theorem/