Banning aluminum bats isn't the solution
Posted: Monday, May 19, 2008 11:50 AM
You don’t expect your son to be killed or incapacitated for life from playing baseball or doing any of the normal activities that are part of childhood for us all. So it’s impossible not to feel deeply for the family of Steven Domalewski, the young boy who was sentenced to a life of around-the-clock care by a baseball.
Domalewski was 12 two years ago when he was struck by a ball in a Little League game. Now his parents are suing the manufacturer of the aluminum bat along with the store that sold the bat and Little League Baseball, which permits its use. The boy nearly died, and when he was revived, his brain had been irreparably damaged by oxygen deprivation. He will require constant care the rest of his life.
The Domalewskis contend that aluminum bats are inherently dangerous and should not be used. Others agree, and there is a move afoot to ban aluminum bats by law in a number of states, including New Jersey, where the Domalewskis live.
They’re in the right forest, but I’m not sure they’re barking up the right tree. Baseball is a dangerous sport, injuring more kids than any other sport and, according to this study, resulting in about three deaths a year.
One of the biggest dangers is being hit in the chest by a batted or thrown ball, which can cause cardiac arrest in a young player. There have been calls to require pitchers to wear chest protectors and for baseballs with softer cores, but studies have shown that both of those supposed solutions actually increase the danger.
Critics of aluminum bats say that the ball comes off faster, thus increasing the danger. Anyone who has used an aluminum bat knows they’re livelier than wooden bats.
Still, Little League Baseball insists that aluminum bats are not the culprit and has the statistics to prove it. Although metal bats were once hotter than wood, Little League says that today’s models are built so that the ball comes off at the same speed it comes off a wooden bat.
That may be technically true, but there are some problems with it. One is that metal bats can be made lighter than wood bats. Domalewski was hit by a ball that came off a 31-inch, 19-ounce Louisville Slugger TPX Platinum bat. The key there is the 19 ounces – which is one ounce lighter than the lightest wooden bats made and three or four ounces less than most wooden bats suitable for use by Little Leaguers.
Physicist Daniel A. Russell has done considerable research on the question, which you can find here. Bottom line is that the typical Little Leaguer will produce the hardest hit balls using a 16-ounce bat. Major Leaguers can hit a ball as hard with a 40-ounce bat as with a 33-ounce bat, but choose the lighter models because they have more control. But as a Little Leaguer’s bat gets heavier, the velocity of the balls hit decreases.
So if the aluminum bats being swung by kids are lighter, the ball’s going to generally come off faster than they would off wood.
The bigger issue is that aluminum bats have a much bigger sweet spot than a wooden bat. Hit a ball off the handle of a wooden bat and the bat breaks. Even if it doesn’t, the ball isn’t going anywhere. Hit it that way with an aluminum bat, and the ball may clear the fence.
So a ball hit on the sweet spot of a wood bat may be the same as that hit by an aluminum bat, but we’re talking 12-year-olds here, and not many of them hit that tiny perfect spot on a wooden bat. But a lot of them hit the much bigger sweet zone on a metal bat. The manufacturers use that in their advertising and brag about how far their bats can hit a baseball. The bottom line is aluminum bats are lighter, which means higher bat speeds and greater ball velocities, and they have a huge sweet zone.
That makes them more dangerous.
But that doesn’t mean they have to banned. Little League Baseball demanded that the bat manufacturers de-tune their sticks and they did. So it can also dictate the size of the sweet spot and the minimum weight. Both measures will substantially reduce the number of vicious line drives.
But here’s where the Domalewskis and all the ban-the-bat crowd are wrong. You can do that or you can even go to wood, but you still won’t eliminate fatalities. Millions of kids play the game. Maybe three a year are killed, and you’re probably never going to eliminate those few catastrophic injuries. The only way to cut out baseball deaths is to cut out baseball.
I don’t think that’s a solution.
