Metal bats should be banned. Imagine stepping into a baseball pitcher’s cleats, bases are loaded, bottom of the ninth, and you’re only one pitch home from securing a win over your opponent. You line up your pitch and before you know it, your fastball is coming straight for your brain-housing group twice as fast.
No matter how quick one might try to catch the ball, it is futile, as in an actual case of a Marin county hospitalized boy who found himself in a coma on March 25, or even a father who died while teaching his son to hit a baseball and was hit by a ball traveling at 114 mph.
Practice makes perfect. Some athletes are gifted phenomenally with hitting a ball. That said, what happens when you take a Louisville aluminum slugger, a well-trained hitter and throw them on the home diamond? One might say you have a solid formula for a home run.
Why would someone get injured and what increases the risk? It’s a matter of physics and a well-trained batter. More importantly, it comes down to the aluminum bat. Now, I am no professional baseball player, but there are some concerns that come to mind when such a bat is used for its actual role, rather than busting in someone’s kneecaps, and it can still land someone in the hospital.
Currently, there are sanctions on metal bats across the nation. The National Softball Association only uses approved models, and measurements have even been inducted for the NCAA.
De Anza College baseball coach Scott Hertler, when asked to comment on such injuries, said, “The incidents are few and far between, but run at a higher cost.”
For reasons of “lower risk management” and even “leveling out the competition,” the old wooden bat is still universal. Still, how does higher batted ball speed translate to better performance that can be costly to the pitcher, catchers, and even basemen?
The answer is a difference of up to eight mph, as the average batted ball speed for a wooden bat is 98.6 mph, as opposed to an aluminum bat that can average 106.5 mph. The averages are based on a pitch that is only 56.6 mph fast. You might be asking yourself, “what does this have to do with a ban?” The “sweet spot” or area on the barrel that will make a ball fly with maximum force and velocity is 10 percent larger on an aluminum bat versus a wooden bat.
To make my point even more evident if you were to use a metal bat: You swing faster, hit longer ranged balls, develop bad habits because of dependency on its “Trampoline Effect,” that is dependence on the compressed spring like effect of the metal allowing more energy to transfer to ball over all. “The game would be a better game with wood bats,” said Hertler.
Ban the aluminum bat. In the end it could mean all the difference of someone in a hospital. A player with no talent might look good, but it allows cheating when you look at it from a physics perspective. Keep the bats wooden because we all know real players use their wood the right way.
