Maple Bats: Should they stay or should they go?

I read this article on sfgate.com and really enjoyed it. So now you can enjoy it!

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/06/08/SP70115G9N.DTL

Maple bats are risky business

Bruce Jenkins

Monday, June 9, 2008

It was no longer a bat, but a split-in-half weapon. As the Giants' Fred Lewis held one piece, the other bounced crazily toward the pitcher's mound, where it slammed into the leg of Colorado pitcher Aaron Cook.

"We've seen a lot of this," said broadcaster Duane Kuiper as an annoyed Cook shook off the injury, "and it's bad. The maple-wood bats - see ya."

It might not be that simple, but Kuiper is right. He's part of a growing baseball community calling for the banishment of maple. We're about to learn if the game is willing to take action - in a meeting scheduled for June 24 - or ignore a very disturbing body of evidence.

"It's going to take somebody getting severely hurt to force a change," said a skeptical Doug Mientkiewicz of the Pittsburgh Pirates. "Anybody who thinks I'm overreacting should go look at our hitting coach's face. It's spooky."

Don Long is the Pirates' coach with half a smile. He was sitting in the dugout at Dodger Stadium April 15 when Nate McLouth broke his bat on a ball that traveled deep into the right-field corner. Long didn't see the weapon hurtling his way. The splintered barrel hit him flush in the left cheek, slicing through muscle and damaging some nerves. Doctors had to remove a piece that had lodged under his skin before sewing up the cut. Long maintains that he was "lucky, when I think about what could have happened," but when he smiles, the left side of his mouth doesn't move. He has no sense of feeling in part of his upper lip.

"All I did was watch Nate's hit," Long said. "I never had any idea the bat was coming."

That's because McLouth had made good contact, right near the sweet spot. We've all witnessed the broken-bat experience over the years, heard that splintering sound, then moved to follow the ball's inevitably tortured path. That's from the days when bats were made strictly of ash. Maple bats are the instrument of choice these days, used by roughly 60 percent of players in the major leagues, and they have become a threat to the game's integrity.

In another April incident at Dodger Stadium, a fan named Susan Rhodes was following Todd Helton's single to center when the barrel half of his shattered bat sailed into her face, breaking her jaw in two places.

About a month later, in Phoenix, one of those flying spears (the remnants of Matt Holliday's bat) crashed into the concrete railing in front of Arizona chief executive officer Jeffrey Moorad and some friends. "If it had been 2 1/2 inches higher," Moorad said, "it might have literally ended up going through one of us."

Seasoned fans recall a frightening incident from 1976 when the Dodgers' Steve Yeager, waiting in the on-deck circle, was struck in the neck by a fragment of Bill Russell's broken bat - literally a life-threatening accident. "But that was a freak thing," Yeager told reporters recently. "Back then, the bats broke, but very seldom did you see one just explode, or see the barrel of the bat go flying. It's nothing like today."

The maple-bat craze was launched single-handedly by Barry Bonds, who enlisted the Canadian-based Original Maple Bat Company in 1999 and used maple to hit his record-breaking 73 homers in 2001. Studies have shown that the ball doesn't travel any farther off maple, but a lot of ballplayers think differently, and they love the feel of the harder, more dense maple.

The problem is that maple bats break for no good reason - and they generally break cleanly in half, putting a second object in play for both players and fans. "All of a sudden, they just explode," White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen said. "You see a half-dozen broken a night, and it's dangerous. I'm serious, this is scary."

Defenders of maple bats claim that it's not merely the nature of the wood, but that so many of today's players prefer thin-handled bats with thick barrels. "I've never really had a problem with my maple bats, but I don't like a big barrel," said Paul Konerko of the White Sox. "Nine times out of 10 when you see a bat helicoptering on the field, it's a big-headed bat with a skinny handle."

When it comes to ash, there's a certain justice to the broken bat, a reward for a pitcher's good work. Ash-crafted bats shatter mostly when players are "jammed" - taking an ill-advised cut at a pitch close to their body - or when they make contact at the very end of the bat. There's no justice, or even predictability, with maple. Only the troublesome thought that some fan, perhaps a small child, could get killed just for sitting in a field-level seat.

Giants equipment manager Mike Murphy said "almost all" of his players use maple, but two of the team's spiritual leaders, Aaron Rowand and Omar Vizquel, are not among them. "I don't like maple at all," Vizquel said. "For one thing, there are too many companies out there (at least 30) manufacturing maple bats, so you don't really know what you're getting, and they break too easily. Plus, I don't like the sound it makes coming off the bat. It's not the same as ash."

Rowand said he's used the same bat model through his career. "I know guys swear by maple because the bats are more dense, " he said, "but I couldn't have that kind of density in my barrel. It would make the thing too top-heavy. You hear it makes the ball travel farther; I don't know about that. When I hit one right here (the sweet spot on his Louisville Slugger), that thing's gonna go."

The Angels' Torii Hunter, disgusted by the sight of so many broken bats, recently swore off maple for good. The Pirates' Jason Bay switched to ash in the third week of May, saying he had "a feeling" they soon will be banned, "so maybe I'm a little ahead of the curve."

When the summit conference takes place in New York later this month, Commissioner Bud Selig and team representatives are bound to get some resistance from the players' union - always a bothersome notion. This is a union that, in resisting drug testing for so long, tacitly approved the rampant use of steroids. A union that lamely keeps the designated-hitter rule alive because it "creates more jobs." Truth be told, when it comes to anything but taking financial care of current and retired players, this union should just sit back and shut up.

It's likely that we'll hear some absolute nonsense from many sources in the realm of solutions, such as:

-- Protective netting installed in every park, running well down each foul line. Wrong. People don't buy those choice seats to sit behind a screen.

-- Place restrictions on bat dimensions, such as a limit on the thickness of handle. Wrong again. If a ballplayer has sworn by certain dimensions since he was a teenager, you don't have the right to make him change.

-- The use of "composite" bats, made of plastic and reinforced resin beneath an ash surface. Absolutely not. These bats are said to hit, feel and look exactly like professional wood bats, but they don't. They only last longer, and they unacceptably resemble aluminum when it comes to hitters blithely fending off inside pitches.

What we'd suggest: a gradual elimination of maple, starting with the reduction of MLB-approved companies to two or three. In the meantime, Hillerich & Bradsby can start the process of filling ash orders for every big leaguer. Give the process a year or two. And pray that the ambulance sirens don't come first.