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pecuniumMaple 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.
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.
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Date: 2008-05-31 02:26 am (UTC)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).