One thing led to another, and he finally said he wished they’d just have gone to wood, and the old asst coach echoed his feelings. The old guy lost his credibility with me on the subject, when he said the reason he wanted to go to wood was because the non-wood bats sounded like hitting a tin can with a rock. Well, that may or may not be a credible argument about “traditional” baseball, but it has no meaning when it comes to play on the field.
When I pressed the HC on it, he said that ever since the BBCOR change, the lists of illegal bats keep changing, and it made it a PITA that wouldn’t happen if they’d simply gone to wood. I agreed, but noted that all I’ve ever been interested in, was seeing the bat performance get back to being relative to developed hitting skills rather than the ability to purchase those hitting skills, and asked if he didn’t think the BBCOR standard was a good thing.
He said it was, but was sick and tired of the mess they made with the rules and lists, and by going to wood, that would all go away. I pointed out that he could easily make a team rule that all of his hitters had to use wood in games, and he seemed appalled, saying it would put our team at a huge disadvantage. I asked how that was possible, given that the non-woods perform almost exactly like wood. We went back and forth for a bit, but in the end he admitted that the only real problem he had was with the way they’d mucked up the lists.
Its interesting to me that often when you dig a little deeper into what people say, you find out that what you might think is their motivation, isn’t that at all.
