Scorekeeper,
Are you pro-wood or anti-wood? When you say you can make a wood bat outperform metal and then say there is not a there is no safety issue I'm getting confused what side of the fence you are on
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.
That is a hypothesis, I don't know. I am throwing comments out for discussion. If you want an opinion I THINK you have to have across the board agreement to change and you will not get that at all youth baseball level because they are of the thinking that there is not a reason to change, and change may cause a loss in participation.
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?
It doesn't take as much work to become even the slightest bit profiecent with metal. Kids use them because it is easier out of the box. Lets make it harder with less success and really frustrate them from the get go. Heck, maybe youth football and basketball should use regular size balls because sooner or later they'll get the hang of it.
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.
You better quite that day job because you will have millions of bats to conform for the players of "little field" baseball players. Remember I am pro-wood on the big field
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.
Why do they insure Ford pintos when they are not as safe as a caddy?
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/[/QUOTE]
I'm not debating a safety issue. PG's post was right on as far as indicating that it may not be a velocity issue but the fact that it may be a "probability" issue because the metal bat has a larger sweet spot thus allowing more solid contact.