The last couple of seasons we’ve heard a lot about baseball bats made of maple, and their propensity to shatter. When the maple bats break, they essentially explode, with chunks flying hither and yon, many with sharp ends or jagged edges. There have been a few injuries to uniformed personnel, and many other near misses.
MLB is concerned about the problem, to the extent that any bats that come apart this season are saved and bundled off to an office somewhere where, presumably, men of science are studying the remains. By now they must have a warehouse full of them.
In roughly 50 years of watching this game, I have never seen as many bats disintegrate as I have this season. And it’s not just the maple bats, either. The traditional ash bats also seem to break into pieces, and that’s a real mystery.
I own several dozen game-used big league bats. They’re virtually all ex-Washington players, and date back as far as the 1920s. Almost all of them are cracked or slightly splintered. Not a single one ever came completely apart. With just a couple of exceptions, they’re all made of ash; I have a couple made of hickory, which, for some reason, was deemed either illegal or obsolete a long time ago.
I own exactly one maple bat. It was used by ex-Nats outfielder Jose Guillen in 2005. It cracked at some point and was discarded — former coach Jack Voigt gave it to me — but never came apart. In fact, it looks much like any other cracked ash bat in my collection.
This particular bat was made by a company called X Bat, which claims its products are “made from select hard maple or sugar maple which, because of its closed grain structure, provides excellent resiliency and greater resistance to denting, fracturing and splintering. The wood is more dense (and heavier) than the northern white ash used in most traditional baseball bats.”
Okay, but “greater resistance to denting, fracturing and splintering” doesn’t mean that it won’t just crack. Still, it stayed together, which counts for something, so my congratulations to Mr. X.
Maple bats this season were supposed to be identified with a two-tone finish: dark barrel, light handle. It’s likely that older bats were still allowed until they ran out, but I’ve been under the distinct impression that many players were going back to ash for fear of injuring another player or a fan.
So, why are the ash bats also coming apart? That’s never been a traditional feature of northern ash. Is there a glitch in the manufacturing process? Has the sport basically exhausted the world’s supply of bat-quality lumber?
Here’s my solution: give every bat a thin coating like safety glass, so it can still break, but would stay in one piece. Maybe that wouldn’t work, but it’s a thought.
Any suggestions out there? Let’s hope baseball deals with this quickly, before, as Mom used to say, somebody puts an eye out.
Phil Wood is a contributor to Nats Xtra on MASN. Contact him at philwood@
washingtonexaminer.com.
