Driving us Batty: Wood vs. Metal

The baseball experience owes a lot to the sounds of the game.

There's the pop of the catcher's mitt on a 98-mph heater, the crowd's roar when the shortstop makes a diving grab on a liner up the middle, and the clash of cleats and dirt when a base runner slides in for a close play at third.

And, of course, there's the ping of the bat when the batter swings for the fences and hits a dribbler to the pitcher's mound.

Laugh if you'd like, but in all non-professional levels of baseball, it's true. From Little League to the College World Series in Omaha, metal bats have been used for decades to mixed reviews.

But the "purity of the game" aside, many folks are reconsidering the use of metal bats for safety reasons. Skip Rozin of the Wall Street Journal tackles the subject in a recent piece called "Killer Bats?"

As anyone who's ever watched a baseball game knows, the sport can become dangerous when a batted ball is in play. And as we all know from the recent death of Tulsa Drillers' first base coach Mike Coolbaugh, metal bats aren't the cause of the danger.

But do they contribute?

Probably, but I think the safety levels before and after any legal changes would be negligible. The reason that this sort of legislation gets pushed through is because of the horrific experiences of parents who have lost their children to a freak accident.

And just like parents of children who have been kidnapped, these parents assume the duty of lobbyists, insisting that it could happen to your child, too. And that's how we get those kidnapping laws with the kid's name in it (e.g., Jenny's Law).

But has anyone noticed that there are still plenty of kidnappings?

Likewise, if you take the metal bats away from baseball, kids and young adults will still sustain serious injuries and even death due to batted balls, simply because the nature of such events is so unforeseen. It's about being in the exactly wrong place at exactly the wrong time.

Someday, I hope to have children that grow up wanting to play baseball. I will encourage it, because baseball is the greatest game there is. I will also warn the kids of the dangers of the sport, which include, but are not limited to the hitting instrument known as a bat.

If wooden bats are mandated by then, I'll gladly head down to the sporting goods store and help them pick out a Louisville Slugger. Wood bats give you a better feel when you hit the sweet spot, anyway.

Times are changing, though, and I just hope that by then we aren't reduced to Styrofoam.