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Bats Out of Hell
March 14, 2007
When politicians get involved in baseball, it's usually to grandstand about steroids. But in New York City, the controversy is over a very different kind of performance enhancer:
The latest fight over performance-enhancement in baseball isn't being waged at spring training, and it has nothing to do with HGH. It's taking place in New York, where a bill banning metal bats in high school games is expected to pass the city council by a comfortable margin Wednesday afternoon. If the measure gains traction, it could change baseball forever.
Or not.
New York is a big town, but it's still only one, and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg might yet veto the measure. Beyond that, chances the manufacturers would sue even before the ban takes effect next fall are about as good as Mariano Rivera protecting a ninth-inning lead. And it's been an emotional, expensive debate already.
"And I'm a conservative Republican," said James Oddo, the Staten Island councilman who led the push for the bill. "I hate government intervention."
The issue here is the safety of ballplayers. Metal bats can make baseball a much more dangerous game, particularly for pitchers, who have the least time to get out of the way of a line drive. There are plenty of anecdotes to back that up, and this study from Brown University showed the difference when bats come from the foundry instead of the lumber yard:
The average speed of a hit off the fastest bat, a metal model, was 93.3 mph; the average off the slowest bat, a wooden model, was 86.1 mph. Only 2 percent of hits made with wooden bats exceeded 100 mph, while 37 percent of the hits with the fastest metal bat [were] more than 100 mph, according to Joseph J. Crisco, associate professor of orthopaedics at the Brown Medical School. However, researchers also found one metal bat performed similarly to wooden bats.
The issue concerns more than safety; there's a real cost to teams when they shift to bats that break. And the companies that make metal bats have a lot on the line as well, according to Councilman Oddo:
"They went from a $50-million-a-year business to $300 million by pushing high-end, high-performance bats, and I had a kid in Staten Island eat a ball a while back. I just don't believe they have the best interests of my constituency at heart."
Popping wood
Meanwhile, wood bats have been evolving as well:
Bats have been engineered with larger heads and smaller handles to produce a whip-like effect.
"It's the biggest change in baseball that people don't realize," said former Yankees bench coach Don Zimmer, who is now a special advisor to the Devil Rays. "When I played, the bats were a lot heavier and bigger in the grip. I brought in one that I had used to the ballpark and players couldn't believe I had used it. Now, when you see a guy swing at a ball, you see half the bat land in the outfield.
"Today, there are bats that crack in half if you don't get the meat of the sweet spot on it. But I guess it works also. And they don't have to worry about the supply as well."
That's why players today order as many as 100 bats per season, four times as many as players used a generation ago. Another change is the shift from ash to maple:
Companies have started to make more and more bats out of maple instead of the traditional ash wood. Maple became popular several years ago when Barry Bonds started using one.
Which is good, because ash trees could very well be endangered:
Since arriving in North America, the emerald ash beetle has killed more than 20 million ash trees and caused economic losses running into the tens of millions of dollars. Rob Lawrence, a forest entomologist with the Missouri Department of Conservation, said the pest could be equally devastating in Missouri, where green and white ash trees are important components of native forests. He noted that ash trees are even more prevalent in urban areas, where their straight trunks and vigorous growth has made them popular park and residential landscape trees. "This beetle has the potential to devastate both rural and community forests," said Lawrence.
Gratuitous spring-training reminder
This is the time of year when players you've never heard of look like superstars, and legitimate major-league regulars look ordinary. If you're a fan, it's important to keep in mind that the players who need to make the team out of spring training are going to come into camp in peak form, able to play at full speed. The guys with guaranteed jobs are going to take it slower, with the goal of being in top form when the regular season starts in April.
I wrote about this last spring, and I'm shameless enough to repeat myself here:
Most of us who aren't athletes tend to think of pro jocks as guys who can turn it on whenever they want. Indeed, their worst game is many times better than our best game. But these guys still have big gaps between the type of performance they're capable of when they're in midseason form and the way they'll play now. No matter what you call it, the professional ballplayers are in spring training. This is their preseason.
Even the idea of "midseason form" is kind of a misnomer. A couple years ago I heard a fascinating lecture by Vladimir Zatsiorsky, a sports scientist who worked in the Soviet Union during the height of the Big Red Sports Machine and is now a professor at Penn State.
He said that an athlete can only achieve what he called "sports form" -- peak condition -- for about four weeks at a time. Some sports, like track and field, are designed for this, and fans get to see athletes who've trained all season so that they peak for the year's most important competition.
Players with long seasons have to make choices. Maybe they never train to hit a peak at any specific time. Maybe, if they're superstars playing on championship teams, they try to peak during the playoffs. But most athletes don't have that option. Marginal players have to peak during the preseason just to make the team. That's why, every year at this time, you read about guys who come from nowhere to make it onto big-league rosters because of their sensational performance in spring training.
These guys rarely go on to have successful seasons, for one obvious reason -- during the regular season, they're going up against seasoned professionals who're starting to hit their peaks -- and one that's not so obvious: The fringe players had their "preseason" in January and February, and by March were in "sports form."
(Thanks to Michael Navin for the heads-up on the metal-bat ban.)
Posted by LouSchuler at March 14, 2007 08:32 AM
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