Aluminum Bats: Is There An Answer?
Friday’s death of a nine-year-old boy in New Jersey, killed by a baseball coming off an aluminum bat, is going to reignite the seemingly never-ending debate over whether such bats should be banned in youth baseball. It’s amazing that it happened in New Jersey, where there’s already a major lawsuit underway over aluminum bats. The parents of a boy left permanently disabled after being hit the the chest with a batted ball are suing bat manufacturers, with the ultimate goal, they say, of banning aluminum bats everywhere.
It’s one of those cases where it’s hard to know whom to believe. Research appears to show that balls jump faster off aluminum bats and slower off wood. The metal bats are lighter and can be swung faster, and there’s a so-called “trampoline effect” where baseballs spring off the aluminum surface. Here’s a piece from a New Jersey columnist (written before this latest tragedy) calling for a ban on metal bats, and citing financial interests by bat manufacturers as the reason they’re still used.
“It’s time our representatives take a lesson from James Oddo, the Minority Leader in the New York City Council. Oddo single-handedly banned aluminum in New York’s high schools in 2007. He took on the industry and, incredibly, beat them. How? By calling out the greed that puts our kids at risk.
“This is all about money,” Oddo said by telephone from his Staten Island office. “When you peel the onion back, it’s all about the profits that are driven by the high-end metal bat market. Of course, they’ll never admit that.”’
But the bat companies say there is no increased danger from using metal bats. They also claim their bats have been “toned down” to not allow for the swing velocity and springiness that opponents cite. Little League baseball also opposes banning metal bats. When you hear people say that there were never these kinds of deaths in the days of wooden bats in little league, I wonder if maybe it’s not the bat, but better batting coaches and bigger, stronger kids that have them hitting the ball harder. This writer says a ban is not the way to go:
“But that doesn’t mean they have to banned. Little League Baseball demanded that the bat manufacturers de-tune their sticks and they did. So it can also dictate the size of the sweet spot and the minimum weight. Both measures will substantially reduce the number of vicious line drives.
But here’s where the Domalewskis and all the ban-the-bat crowd are wrong. You can do that or you can even go to wood, but you still won’t eliminate fatalities. Millions of kids play the game. Maybe three a year are killed, and you’re probably never going to eliminate those few catastrophic injuries. The only way to cut out baseball deaths is to cut out baseball.
I don’t think that’s a solution.”
I see what he’s saying, but when it involves the lives of young children, there should be no “acceptable losses” with the use of any sporting equipment.
Like most people who grew up playing with wooden bats, I think that’s the way to go. But lots of youth baseball organizations can’t afford to replenish wooden bats that get broken every game and practice. Does there have to be a greater element of danger for the young players just because of that? And can’t we be more precise about how much greater that element of danger is? After all the research, it still seems like it comes down to he said/he said. The New Jersey lawsuit will illuminate some of these issues, perhaps. In the meantime, since New York City did ban aluminum bats, maybe there could be some new research launched with youth baseball games here as kind of a wooden bat control group; maybe they can finally get a clean comparison that way.
Let me know your thoughts on the matter.
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Comments: 9
i believe that just a simple ban on this would lead parents to not buy the metal bats for their children, which would mean that accidents like this one would never have happened. In my opinion, just having to replace a few wooden bats a year compared to saving a life or a life altering injury is worth it any day
What about the wood bats that break and splinter? Young players can be injured just as easily by shards of wood or a barrel of a bat that become airborne after a bat breaks.
Forget about the money issue - that wood bats would ultimately be more expensive than aluminum bats. In my opinion, injuries or unfortunate tragedies can occur with either type of bat.
The question that must be answered is this: What harm could possibly come from switching to wooden baseball bats? If the research suggests aluminum bats produce greater exit velocity, then why not switch to wood as a safety precaution? We are talking about children who should be playing sports for fun, recreation and team spirit. The next stop for our kids is not the Yankee's farm team. A law would probably help, but reasonable coaches across the state should self-impose restrictions as a measure of safety, leadership and paternalism. Remember this folks: These children are our most precious investment. Take good care of them.
The question that must be answered is this: What harm could possibly come from switching to wooden baseball bats? If the research suggests aluminum bats produce greater exit velocity, then why not switch to wood as a safety precaution? We are talking about children who should be playing sports for fun, recreation and team spirit. The next stop for our kids is not the Yankee's farm team. A law would probably help, but reasonable coaches across the state should self-impose restrictions as a measure of safety, leadership and paternalism. Remember this folks: These children are our most precious investment. Take good care of them.
In order to remove aluminum bats from baseball, wooden bats have to become a lot less expensive. the reason aluminum bats wont go away is that for the same price as a wooden bat, you can buy a metal bat that will last your kid at least 2yrs. where as with a wood bat, the ball could find a weak spot in the wood and shatter the bat. So if you want to get rid of metal bats, which I totally agree with, the price of wooden bats must decrease down between $25-$35 dollars
I'll offer a study from 2003-2005.
http://www.kettering.edu/~drussell/bats-new/alumwood.html
This may not be the last word, but it does support a statistically relevant velocity increase for a ball struck with aluminum as compared with wood.
It seems reasonable to conclude that if reflexes are good enough to matter even in only 1 of 1000 cases, that difference might save a child from catastrophic injury. In a sport (Little League) which separates the two main combatants by 46 feet, a ball batted at 90 mph can get to the pitcher in 1/3 of a second. How much less time than THAT should we allow the kid to duck or swerve? This would raise "Big Brother" concerns in venues where adults or college athletes are concerned. But where children, especially this young, are involved, it just seems that legislating for wood on the side of caution is an absolute no-brainer.
Why not "tune down" aluminum bats? First generation aluminum bats were great. Today we have $300+ bats made with the latest high-tech aerospace materials - sold at high profit margin too.
Is it safety or corporate sponsorships (money) that Little League is so concerned with?
It is just amazing to me how quickly topics of this type become financial in nature. The bottomline is that a kid was killed and how to prevent it in the future, regardless of the cost. Now most bat makers claim that aluminum bats don't increase the velocity of balls but after watching lots of college games, I beg to differ. There's got to be a way to get this problem fixed. How many of these type accidents have to happen before someone takes this seriously?
After watching my 16 year old son take a direct hit to his right eye from a line drive off an aluminum bat I believe that these bats should be banned from little league to college. My son had no time to react at all and as I sit here and wait to see if he will need reconstruction surgery to his face I rethink the pitch over and over in my mind. Yes these incidents might not occur often but when it is your child that is laying on the pitchers mound and you are sure whether he is alive then you will understand. We are very fortunate in that my son's sight is fine and that there was no tramatic brain injury, only a massive amount of damage to his beautiful face. Wooden bats don't have the same velocity just ask a kid that has been hit by a ball off a wooden bat vs an aluminum bat.