Wooden bats

P-Dog

We use maple almost exclusively and our breakage is minimum from July to October

P-Dog...we have been playing with wooden bats since 1998. As a coach, love it! Quick games, more situational hitting as opposed to mashing, etc... However, I have had many college coaches in this area tell me they hate to see wood bats at the 17-18 level. Only a hand full of kids know how to hit with wood, and it is virtually impossible for them to evaluate the others because of poor hitting technique with the wood.

P-Dog,

My understanding is this...maple is naturally more dense than ash so if two bats are of equal size, the maple will be heavier. Since that makes it harder to swing, some manufacturers will lighten the maple bats by drying them more thoroughly, taking out more of the natural moisture content. This will make them lighter and more manageable, but also more brittle. If you have a light weight maple bat (roughly minus 3), it would be more likely to break than a similar ash bat.

Again, that's my understanding. Our team toured a bat manufacturer and he went into great detail about why maple bats break more often than ash bats. I assumed, since he was an ash bat maker, that he was biased, but the bats we bought from him lasted well through heavy summer play. Our opponents seemed to break about four times as many bats as we did.

Mike F

Mike...that is because your pitchers were gettin in the hitter's kitchen!!!

Mike, you are correct with your explination.

Our experience has been that maple bats break with more frequency than they used to, and also more than ash bats.

We hit with wood most of the summer, and most of our players like to hit with ash. They do just fine with ash.

I tend to agree with some of the above posters...

I've played in a Roy Hobbs 30+ league for the last two years. Most of the players got maple bats. I got some Maple and some Ash...I definitely felt that the maple was harder, but also felt that for that reason it broke more easily.

I definitely liked the feel of an ash bat better than the feel of maple..

It also seems to me that the wooden bats are not only breaking with more frequency(maple more than ash) but are breaking in ways they never used to break.

Seems like bats nowadays are shattering and chipping or breaking completely in half and
flying out in the field. I may be wrong in my assessment but I don't remember bats in the
"olden days" shattering but mainly just cracking and having to grab the barrel end of the bat and hit the handle end off home plate to check it out. Does anyone else remember it
this same way?

The Florida Collegiate League had 2-5 bats breaking every game-way too many in my estimation.

Another reason might be that maple is so popular right now. As I understand it, only a couple of the many varieties of maple are really suited for baseball bats. Yet, with the exploding popularity of maple, I would guess that manufacturers are using whatever maple they can get their hands on so that they can 'say' they have maple bats. Hence, poor quality and more breakage.

Just a guess.

I am not sure one way or another about Maple vs Ash. But I can tell you that my son started the season with 12 Maple bats and came home with 11. The bats he uses are the hardest bats I have ever seen. I always liked ash, but I played so long ago I don't think they had Maple trees.

O42

So that is what happened to the quality of my syrup. LOL

What about bamboo bats? Anyone have experience with those?

Moc1:

Good observation on your part.

Everything else being equal bats made from the same specie of wood will react similarly when used, this includes the manner in which they may fail.

In the old days, when bats were nearly always made from ash, you didn't see alot of variation in the way they would fail.

Nowadays there are several different wood species used to manufacture bats...even bamboo which botanically is a grass, not a tree.

You could reasonably expect that bats manufactured from the same specie would react similarly and conversely bats manufactured from different species will perform differently, maybe even especially when they fail.

Characteristics like ring count per inch (influencing density) and slope of grain (influencing shear) and others are all taken into account when deciding which particular lumber from within a specie is suitable for manufacturing bats. These same characteristics will determine if certain species are suitable for making bats.

As to the quality of the lumber that is available today vs. the past it probably is similar. Suitable lumber may not be as abundant as it once was but it still exists and the marketplace sees to it that it finds its way into the bat manufacturers' inventory.

They do not use inferior or unsuitable wood if they know what they're doing. Their good reputation, their most valuable asset, rests on the quality of their product. If they plan to be around in the long run then they pay close attention to the wood coming into their shops.

quote:

Originally posted by bkekcs:
What about bamboo bats? Anyone have experience with those?

The Brett Brothers bamboo laminate bats hold up well.

My son, 16, used a bamboo bat in fall Wood bat league and a DiMarini maple/composite bat also. He liked the maple better (homered with it) and so I got him one for Christmas. The bamboo were fine, I suppose, little chance of breakage from what I have heard.

I second that on the Brett bats. My 06 had one for over a year before it snapped in two on the handle, and has another he's still using.

My sons have been using the composite DeMarini bats since last Christmas. They have never broken although one did have the knob start to come loose. DeMarini replaced it with a new bat without question. The younger son used his bat only for batting practice. For the older one, it was batting practice and then all summer in a collegiate league. I think it's money well spent.