Should aluminum bats be banned?

I wish Baseball would return to wood bats, but I don't think it will happen any time soon.

Metal bats certainly increase the velocity of the ball coming off the bat, but I would challenge an extra 150ft. I have found that a ball hit on the sweet spot of a wooden bat will travel almost as far as a metal bat. The big difference between the two is that a metal bat is more forgiving. A pitch that might break a wooden bat can easily turn into a base hit with a metal bat. The same is true for balls off the end of the bat where a soft groundout would be the result with a wood bat it can turn into a base hit with a metal bat. I do share your concern about pitchers being in a scary position on blasts hit back up the middle. I am concerned that with the skill levels and the strength of players improving every year, it is only a matter of time before more than the occasional player gets severely injured.

Our Am Legion league used wood this past yr - I had mixed feelings on it. One drawback [ignoring the safety issue for a moment] is that just as the pros have to project a college player from metal to wood, college coaches looking at Legion players [or anyone using wood for that matter] have to project back up to aluminum. As the dad of a pitcher, I liked the way it deadened the ball, from a safety amd ERA standpoint!! An increase from 250-400 feet is greatly exagerated --60% - I've read it is more like 5-7%. Know what I'd like to see??? Have the MLB Home Run derby using aluminum one year!! Clear the kids off the field and let 'em rip! Think about a -3 in the hands of a Jim Thome!

So it's even more important that they switch to wood in college. The kids are bigger and stronger. They can be DEADLY for the pitcher. Is this what it will take to make a change?

This debate never ends !!

Massachussetts High schools went to wood for a year and are now back to aluminum

We play wood whenever we can, not for safety reasons, but for the purity of the game and nothing else

One other point--- the balls are wound tighter now; the players are bigger and stronger and the pitchers throw harder--I think you will find just as many come backer injuries using wood as you do in aluminum== a lot also to do with the fact that pitchers today do not spend enough time on their fielding not to mention ending their delivery in a proper position to field anything hit back to them

NOTE-- when I was a kid I nearly took my kid brothers eye out with a comebacker playing wiffle ball

Not to mention the injury risk from broken wood bats. We had some close calls this summer - MANY broken bats due to inferior quality wood [they don't make 'em like they used to] and the kids not knowing the proper way to hit with wood. Easier to catch/deflect a hard comebacker than it is to stop the barrel of a broken bat windmilling at you [pun intended].

I’m a wood advocate and have always liked the sound of a well hit baseball on a wood bat. There is another aspect of the alum/wood debate we fail to discuss… the complete complexion of the game. With aluminum, the hits increase, scoring is higher and the chicks can dig the long ball. In other words, the fans, Mom and Dad, Grandma and Grandpa, can all become more involved in the game when the battery is equipped with aluminum. While I prefer wood, I do see some advantage of aluminum especially at the younger ages. As far as injuries go, I agree with TRHit. If you ever watch college BP using wood, you would understand why the injury reduction would be negligible. That ball is smoking coming off the wood bat too. My son called just tonight..said in BP he had five line drives of the wall. I asked: “Wood or Aluminum? He said: “Wood”.
Fungo
I almost killed my brother with a comebacker from a wood bat..knocked him cold as a wedge... it was a golf ball we found...

Raise the mound back to the original height and dump the metal bats, now that's what I am talking 'bout. Wood bats rock!

CV

I don't think that wood will ever be back in College, at least in the top 100 or so D1 schools. The schools/coaches get a nice check every year to use the metal bats.The makers of the wood bats don't give checks out to use their bats.......you send them checks. The good maple bats are now between $70-100 and they break like twigs. The cost to use them would be tremendous. People say that MLB should buy the bats for the schools, but they would have two problems......1. The schools/coaches who get the yearly check and 2.The NCAA accepting bats from a professional baseball organization won't happen.....they won't let the skier from Colorado play football, so I don't think they will take the bats from MLB. The composition bats that don't break are garbage.....poor balance and are almost the same as the metal bats.

I don't know what percentage an aluminum bat increases distance compared to a wood bat is but you can definitely tell kids who have pop using wood and those who don't. I think someone said, "Colt made every man equal" same goes to LS, Easton, DeMarini and others.

I think the safety issue will only serve to keep metal out of the pros; it won't take the metal out of hs/college. Fungo makes the point --- people love offense, whatever it does to the game (look at basketball).

Many players here have pro dreams; many just want to enjoy their hs or college baseball experience as an enhancement to their education. Are you interested in using wood so that your player can be projected appropriately by the pros, for traditional baseball reasons, or for safety? All are valid reasons, but I don't know that any or all of them together would force a return to wood.

Even the safety issue may not be that compelling. (And I fully appreciate that if the injury is to your son or any player you care about, that issue is critical) But think of all the games played every year and the small number of injuries from comebackers. You'd have an infinitely easier time arguing in favor of outlawing cars based on safety than eliminating aluminum bats.

But the question about getting rid of metal bats should go back to: where the heck did aluminum come from originally? Does anyone here know? Those of us 'of a certain age' certainly didn't use aluminum as kids. (I've still got one of my old softball bats...and I have NO idea how I was able to swing that monster )

I believe it probably comes back to supply, economics, and durability. Bats that can be swung by young children so that they can be successful have to be pretty light. Light wood bats will break, and that gets expensive. Keep in mind that while we all talk about the $300 models, when our sons were first starting, the bats they used were under twenty bucks. And I would venture to say that the majority of young ball players out there are not investing what the average parent here does on equipment.

Then there's the supply question. Shall all youth leagues over a certain age go to wood as well as all hs? How about just colleges? Think about the number of college and JC programs out there. Where's all this wood coming from?

Orlando,

As Paul Harvey would say "The rest of the story"

Blame it on Worth Bat Co.

Aluminum Bat History

CV

One comment on original post re: uneven playing field for those that can't afford the most expensive alum bats.

You have to remember that wood bats break and most HS programs can't afford the additional equipment cost of funding wood bats ... so if a kid can't afford a $200+ alum bat, figure he's also going to go through 2-4 wood bats in a season at $50-$75 each for mass produced, significantly more for custom X-bat, Sam Bat, etc. So going wood is not cheaper over the course of an entire season unless the kid is either very lucky or can't hit it out of the infield.

Our HS program uses wood in the off-season as a training program ... smaller sweet spot, different weight distribution requires more discipline, and the kids have to develop better hand speed to get comparable pop. The kids buy their own bats. The best hitters on the team tend to break fewer bats ... they don't miss often ... but there's a lot of average hitters on any HS team that are going to hit off the handle or cup often, meaning frequent breakage. Just this fall alone most of the players have broken at least one bat, a few have broken 2-3.

Thanks, cv, that was interesting. And didn't Tennessee Thunder used to post here?

I also found this article:

AliBat development

which postulates that aluminum was introduced for economy and durability and only afterwards did they discover that it had 'other advantages' as well. Enter the trampoline effect and all the engineering-a-better-AB stuff.

It also goes on to talk about the brain trust at the NCAA's efforts to thrwart the batted ball becoming a WMD.

Should they - yes.
Will they - no.

What is the alternative? Perhaps there is a way to design an aluminum bat that has a sweet spot the same size as wood bats and hits balls off the handle no better than a wood bat yet still doesn't break. That would be the easy part. Getting rules in place requiring that type of bat would be the hard part.

I'm not against aluminum at 12u although some of the fences need to be moved and there's no need for the flex bats.

bbscout has hit the sweet spot.

The bat industry dictates the direction of the college baseball. However, here is food for thought. Maybe the parents of LL and HS players dictate the direction of the bat industry. Mom and Dad want to see little Johnny happy, and Johnny's happiest when he has the best bat on the team and/or hits the ball over the fence. Now you get the bat companies funneling money into their R&D in order to satisfy the consumers desires and make their niche in the market. In order to re-coup the R&D dollar they have to sell X number of bats over X number of years. This then becomes a repeating trend and the bat companies do not have an "out" without losing their place in the market.

You then get into the college game where a team is under contract to use a specific bat and may be paid for doing so. The bat industry makes no money here but now has corporate write offs, advertizing, and a foot in the door due to program budgets to financially dictate the direction of the rule that allows metal bats. With that mentality in place the industry does not have to develop a new technology (composite) that is economical to a small sliver of the bat market, the college game.

Now if the pros requested a composite bat with wood characteristics, my bet is the college game would follow closely behind. However, this will not happen because the wood bat manufactures have a hold on the pro market but cannot sudsidize both pro and college games due to the lack of premium natural resources (wood).

Now you look at the technical advances and alloy developmnt of the metal bat over the last 15 years. My question is why can't a composite bat with the properties of wood but resiliancy of matal be developed?

Because that bat will not make little Johnny happy.

This is only the opinion of a college pitchers father who witnessed the difference in ball velocity during the college metal season versus the college summer wood bat season. Maybe the overall parent mentality would change if all the little Johnny's threw some LL or HS bp with mom and dad in the stands. After all these years I'm pretty calussed and resigned to the fact it will not change in the near future so any change will not affect my son. However, as an old LL pitching parent that had the thought in the back of my mind at his every outing, I hope a group stands up. I remember having a large sarcasic smile on my face listening to parents usually screaming to knock the pitchers head off and the next moment scared to death to have their son batting against a hard throwing pitcher who just went "up-n-in".

Here's where I am confused folks.

Fact: The NFHS and ? have tested the bats and said that with the (BESR) Ball Exit Speed Ratio bats the ball is leaving the bat at a comparitive speed to that of a wooden bat.

Question: If that is true why are we (baseball fans & parents), most of which are not engineers and scientist, able to visably see a difference in the way the ball travels in a wood game vs a metal game?

Answer that !

Come on, I've coached for a long time and when we play in wood bat tournaments my outfielders play shallow.

If THEY say it's the same it MUST be the same ?

Surely no one would try to pull the wool over our eyes, would they ?

CV

cvsting, they would not lie, it has to be the atmospheric conditions, position of the moon, the tides, or a parental aging issues. All issues beyond the BESR testing thresholds.

As a pitcher's dad, I'm all for wood. Son played in a wood bat league this summer. It just looked and sounded more like "real" baseball to me.

cvsting,
Ever tried hitting golf balls with the old blades? If you hit it perfect it goes like crazy. If you are a little off center it doesn't go far at all. For those of us with less than professional ball striking ability the ball goes further using a cavity back because we almost always hit the ball a little bit off the sweet spot. Perhaps something of the sort is happening with the aluminum bats. Most balls are probably hit a bit off the sweet spot and they go much further than with wood even though the BESR is limited. The hitters who hit the ball with the sweet spot much more often than most will have your outfielders playing back no matter what type of bat they use. Just an idea. Nothing scientific to back it up.

I suppose for arguement sake you can accept the sweet spot vs sweet spot testing. However, as you move away from that "quarter" size spot on the bat the similarities between the two go out the window.

How many times do you hear "I just missed it" versus "I hit that one on the nutt".

As a high school player, I would love for us to use wooden bats. I use wood in BP and in the cage, and it just feels a lot better. The switch would also seperate the real hitters from the players who get base hits off garbage pitches off the end of the bat of the skinny part of it.

A sure scientific test would be to get Bonds to give it a try since we're talking top end here, and if a ball hits a hula girl on top of the head in Honolulu, we know we've got a problem.



CV

I wonder if they test sweet spot to sweet spot only, conveniently ignoring that an alibat is all sweet spot as compared to wood.

I know safety should come first. However, many coaches such as myself have had their athletic budgets drastically cut. It is happening everywhere around our area. My budget was cut in half. As bad as this sounds, realistically, I can't afford to purchase wooden bats for a season. We buy 2 new bats/year. That gives us 2 new, 2 1-year old and then we rotate the 3rd year's bats to the lower levels. Granted, kids also supply their own. I believe that wood would cause me to have very little money left for other things. This is my opinion. I don't know realistically how much using composites etc. in practice would affect all of this.

Probably should be....but it will never happen. Simple economics.

Here's an interesting spin.
Why not change the baseball. They have different types of balls. Instead of having so much elasticity (sp)and rubber, maybe a little more yarn would help to dead-end the ball

CADad

quote:

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Just an idea. Nothing scientific to back it up.

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I'm disappointed...no stats? Come on now, I know you can do better than that (you're always "blinding me with science" )

This has been touched on in this topic, but let me asked it a little more directly. I coached with a guy who played some minor league ball. His thinking was that he did not believe that a ball hit on sweet spot of aluminum bat went any further than one on the good wooden's sweetie. I disagreed (and still do). My disagreement does not come from any scientific origin...just from the Yogi school of "you can observe a lot by watching". What are the expert opinions?

quote:

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Originally posted by DaddyBo:

I coached with a guy who played some minor league ball. His thinking was that he did not believe that a ball hit on sweet spot of aluminum bat went any further than one on the good wooden's sweetie. I disagreed (and still do). My disagreement does not come from any scientific origin...just from the Yogi school of "you can observe a lot by watching". What are the expert opinions?

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I'm no expert (just ask my wife) , but the longest home run I ever saw my son hit was with wood. I believe that if you hit it right, it will go no matter what you use.

However, I also agree that the sweet spot on wood is about 3 inches long as opposed to about 8' on an aluminum bat which makes it more forgiving.

While the sweet spot is certainly bigger with metal, another factor is that metal bats can produce greater bat speed.

A metal bat can be made so that there is less of the weight on the end enabling it to be swung faster compared to its wood counterpart.

Anyone that argues that metal bats are as safe as wood are out of touch. They also change the game. There is no comparison between metal and wood. I dont believe we will ever see in our lifetimes wood in high school but maybe we will see it change at least in college. In my opinion metal bats should be banned for two reasons. #1 Safety of the players, all the players especially pitchers. #2 The integrity of the game. I never swung metal because I graduated in 1977 and we used wood. I used it in Little League and all the way up to High School. I see pitchers make great pitches and kids get hits on pitches that would be pop ups or routine ground ball outs. My Legion team this summer played in some wood bat games. It was great. We beat a team 4-1 and it felt like we were up by 10 runs. We lost a game 3-1 and it felt like we were down 10 runs. It brings back the real game. Bunting runners over and moving runners over. Its just better baseball and a whole lot more fun at least for me as a coach. Our players loved it. I guess Im just dreaming. Ill tell you one thing it sure separates the true hitters. With the metal alot of kids stand out at the plate. With the wood the true hitters are the only ones that stand out. And the ones who have true power still show it even with the wood.

Just curious...Does the BESR mean anything?

Just "Google it" ... found at www.baseballtips.com:

BESR stands for “Ball Exit Speed Ratio,” an independent and scientific calculation designed to measure the performance of non-wood bats.

The National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) adopted the BESR bat performance standard in June 2001, a move that follows the steps taken by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) in 1999.

Elliot Hopkins, NFHS liaison to the Baseball Rules Committee, highlighted the reasoning behind the rule change in a July 27, 2001 press release, "Adding the BESR requirement for bats used in high school baseball is a continuation of changes made for the 2001 season to ensure that bat performance mirrors the performance of wood bats."

The Baseball Exit Speed Ratio (BESR) mark ensures a bat will have:

A maximum exit speed on the approved test which limits performance to mirror the best Northern White Ash wood bats
Met the moment-of-inertia requirement (balance point)
A barrel diameter not exceeding a maximum of 2 5/8 inches
A length to weight differential of no greater than minus 3

pbone, I do know WHAT it means, or stands for..I guess I should say..Has it changed any opinions in the wood/aluminum saftey debate?? If not...Why not?
Fungo

I believe the cost issue is not as big as most say. If the colleges went to a composite wood bat, I think it could actually be cheaper on the programs. A few years ago, we bought 6 Baum bats for our college team. Twenty or so players used them everyday....in the cage, on the field, in scrimmages...they were still good after a year and a half. After that, I traded them to another school for some aluminum bats. Baum bats cost around 110-125 a piece. You could buy a bat for each player (14-18 typically on a roster) for about the same price as 8-10 aluminum bats. There is no doubt we couldn't use "real" wood but the composite is a viable alternative. Just my opinion!

Sorry ... west coast, not enough coffee yet Brain was still at half-speed.

Fungo, I think the rating thing is an attempt to quantify what isn't quantifiable. In order to measure, they use a "standard" impact....and if everybody swung the bat in the same way, at the same speed, and with the same strength, that would be important.

The one way I think it has has a positive impact (pun intended....or, at least, not avoided ) is that it's put a cap on the manufacturers going crazy like the golfing equipment has done and developing bats that literally could put a ball into orbit.

I posted something about the BESR and what it really meant in August, here is the post:

quote:

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posted August 17, 2004 01:12 PM
Most people think of the Ball Exit Speed Ratio being no more than 92mph, well that's just false if you ask me.

Take a look at this link and do some calculations on your own to see how hard and fast some of the balls can come off the bat.

Ball Exit Speed Ratio

Now plug into the equation velocity of pitch at 80mph, and the bat velocity of 80mph. The BESR ratio is set at .728 (based on the studies).

I come up with a 116.48 mph missle coming off a bat.

I hope someone proves me wrong, just imagine an 90 mph pitch and a 80 mph swing. 118.76 mph

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It's still a joke.

Some of you might change your opinion about the use of aluminum bats in high school ball if you witnessed what I did this summer. One of our pitchers was hit in the head with a comeback ball. He is very fortunate to be alive.