Baseball

[pecunium]

Maple bats... bad idea.

I'm watching the Mets and the Dodgers. Chan Ho Park just missed getting run through by a "splinter" (to reach for a Men of War era term). If this were the first time in the season I'd seen a pitcher lucky to avoid being speared I'd not think so much of it.

But where I'd see a bat get broken every half a dozen games or so, now I'm seeing a steady diet of them; not less than one per game, and more like three. I do some woodworking, and maple didn't strike me as a great wood for bats. Seems I was right, and it was worse than I was afraid.

When an ash (or the rare player who still used hickory) bat breaks, it loses a lot of the swing energy and breaks into 3-4 pieces. Yes, the largest might travel, but it usually flies closer to the baseline the batter is facing than it does to the pitcher.

The maple seems to break into two pieces, and shoot much closer to straight up the middle, and with a larger piece of wood.

I hope that the player and owners meeting in June, to discuss the bats, outlaws maple... because someone is gonna get hurt.

Comments

[packbat.livejournal.com]

Crap, I hadn't thought of that. Are there other woods under consideration besides ash and hickory?

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

There aren't more than a couple of players who use hickory (if any, but it was the wood of choice until ash was brought in).

Pecan would be ok (it's much like hickory, not as light as ash, not as heavy as hickory).

In terms of how the behave the two woods are about the same (the weight of hickory is offset by the higher Reynold's number of ash), and pecan probably performs about the same.

My guess, ash is coming back (since there is ash in the pipeling, and the players were used to it), and the owners aren't getting the savings they expected (since the idea was certainly that maple would cost less, but the rate of breakage is probably eating the savings).

[wcg.livejournal.com]

Well, you know what the old players say. There's nothing like a good piece of ash.

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

Would this apply to extremely roughly used martial arts equipment as well? Given that the usual safety test of a hanbo is to give it a solid whack on a tree... I like oak, maple's been alright but not great, hadn't considered ash.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yes, and no. The general level of impact for martial arts equipment is much less extreme for bat and ball. Realise that a baseball, at impact is compressed as much as 40 percent.

But, the cross section of most martial arts equipment is much less, the grain becomes much more important (the "thin" part of a bat is still thicker than most bo/jo). So ash would be ok, but I'd still go for oak or hickory.

There are some jo/bo and bokken available in some very hard (and heavy) exotic woods, but the weight makes them something for people with either very strong wrists, or lots of experience.

[feonixrift.livejournal.com]

I rather strongly dislike being hit with the heavier woods.

[starwatcher]

.
because someone is gonna get hurt.

The post just above yours on my flist links to this story. Someone has been hurt -- $7,000 so far, no assurance of full recovery -- and the team management refuses to pay any of the medical expenses.

I just -- words fail me. You'd think the players themselves would take up a collection for the woman, if management was being hardass.
.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Damn.

Damn.

Damn.

I understand why they are against paying, but I would have thought the Dodger's would have handled it better. I have a friend whose father was clocked by a ball. The team doctor stitched him up (split lip) and the ball was autographed by the team.

I think the O'Malleys would have covered it (esp. because this was a bat, not a ball) but post Murdoch...

Shit.

[vanmojo.livejournal.com]

There's no question the O'Malley's would have covered it... and then some...

But that's who they were... and Murdork is pretty far from being Walter O'Malley.

mojo sends

Just got home from

[dragonet2.livejournal.com]

a Very Disappointing Royals game versus the Indians. The tickets were a charity auction item at Conquest and we got a deal. It was close (4-5) and the Friday fireworks only sort of made up for it. But we're now 12 losses out and it sucks.

And while I wasn't close enough to the plate in this game, we went on Mother's Day, sat on the third base line and I witnessed several bats breaking in alarming ways.

Re: Just got home from

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

I'm sorry your team isn't doing well.

The Dodgers are hanging on, but it's going to be a tough season; the D-backs are just eating up the opposition.

718, baby!

[spiritualmonkey.livejournal.com]

Not traditional, but polypropylene is nigh indestructible and element proof. (http://www.coldsteel.com/92bsseries.html)

More on the Brooklyn girls (http://lib.store.yahoo.net/lib/csstoreonline/smasher.pdf).

How many eyes are tradition worth? Just asking.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

There's a reason for the tradition of using ash and hickory in tool handles. Maple is wonderfully hard and durable, but I've always felt the trade-off was a certain brittleness in some circumstances. You haven't told me anything that's changed my mind, clearly.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

I'm not privy to the more arcane requirements of baseball bats, but over the years I've made a fair amount of sawdust & shavings, so have some understanding of wood. I assume that the usage in this discussion is over-simplified -- "oak" and "maple" must be shorthand terms for certain species, not the ones that are remarkably brittle (as some species of each are). But there are other factors that people who work with wood understand: for both construction purposes (strength) and appearance (grain), there's a _big_ difference between the (usually) more compact and stronger old-growth woods and the plantation-grown newer ones. And even within a species and growth-type there can be an equally big difference in the graining of individual trees, with maple being notorious for this. I'd like to be able to assume that major-league bats are made by highly-skilled craftsmen who are highly-selective about the material they use, but comments using the word "expense" lead me to think that such an assumption would be unwise.

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Bats are made by craftsman. IIRC the price for each of the ash bats is something like $95.

The players place orders for what they want. A large number of them go to the factory and discuss it, in detail (the two-tone bat pattern is because someone [I want to say Honus Wagner] was at the factory and like the pattern he saw on a bat. When he was told it came from that bat being used as a stirring paddle for the dye on solid colored bats. He said, that's fine, just use my bats to stir the mix, and then ship them out).

But the cost isn't trivial (somewhere in the $90 range for the ash) and maple is less expensive.

Bonds was also fond of maple, and he hit a lot of home runs...

On the other hand, he struck out a lot, so the knocks his bats took may have hidden some of the problems which a contact hitter is going to cause his wood.

[don-fitch.livejournal.com]

Maybe I'm just getting Old&Jaded, but I no longer automatically equate "craftsman" with "quality", or "(relatively) expensive" with "good". Sometimes those work, and sometimes not -- and increasingly (it seems) the not applies. Perhaps the teams need to bring to their Quality Control an attitude that they have to pay more attention, and that this might cost them, say, twice as much per bat. Professional Baseball is not, after all, a penny-ante game. Although... I don't entirely discount the possibility that they desire to make the sport more thrillingly dangerous, perhaps as an adjunct to making it more spectacular.

[intelligentrix.livejournal.com]

I just read an article in the Lagniappe section of last week's Time-Picayune about the problem of the imported ash-borer beetle and the impact it's beginning to have on baseball bat manufacturing. I couldn't find a link to that article, but did find a different one here.

The graphic that accompanied the article I read showed areas of quarantine in the US centered on Detroit, MI and spreading out to encompass regions of all bordering states. It's a disturbing picture and shows forces other than economics driving the shift away from ash. If things go badly and these infestations aren't controlled, ash bats may become extinct.

[texaslawchick.livejournal.com]

I've only been/paid attention to one game this year, but there were two broken bats in that game.