Critics Warn Of The Hazards Of High-Tech Bats -- New Bats Don't Give Players Time To React

From the Web site of Ashurst Technology Ltd.:

"Scandium (Sc) is one of the most potent alloying elements in the periodic table. When added to aluminum (Al) alloys, scandium can significantly increase strength and grain size. Only recently available in the Western Hemisphere at commercially feasible prices, Sc has been added to aluminum alloys in the former Soviet Union for missiles and MiG fighter applications."

And, in the United States, baseball bats.

Gone are the days when a baseball bat was made of wood and featured the burned-in autograph of Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays or Ted Williams.

Today baseball bats feature names that would make NASA proud and, many feel, have become dangerous weapons.

The Easton Z-Core BZ3Z bat, according to an advertisement, has a "scandium alloy shell, high-strain inner core and new Z-Flex core design."

The Louisville Slugger Air Attack 2 bat is "improved by adding 30 (pounds per square inch) of nitrogen to the bladder of the thin wall of the C405-Plus baseball bat."

And there's the new Copperhead ACX by Worth Inc., with its $290 price tag and "piezoelectric transducer." It uses the same technology being tested in the tails of F-18 Hornet fighter jets to reduce vibrations.

Some would call it better hitting through technology.

Cheryl Aluxek, stepmother of Jeremy Aluxek, a pitcher for a Holyoke, Mass., high school team who is recovering from being hit in the head by a batted ball, would call it a life-threatening situation.

"The aluminum bats don't give you a chance to react," Cheryl Aluxek says. "They're too dangerous. That ball that hit Jeremy was going well over 100 miles per hour, the doctor told us."

Jeremy Aluxek was pitching on May 28 when an opposing batter hit a line drive that struck the 15-year-old just above the right temple. The impact left Aluxek with a skull fracture, bleeding in his brain and numbness on his left side. Doctors expect a full recovery after a three-month hiatus from baseball.

"It was a rocket - I never hit a ball that hard," says Fran Towle, the 5-foot-10, 140-pound boy whose liner struck Jeremy. "The first thing I thought was that Jeremy was dead. He wasn't moving."

Towle was using a Louisville Slugger Air Attack bat.

"Jeremy's very lucky to be alive," said his coach, Jim Woods. "The technology has an unbelievably scary aspect, a very dangerous factor."

That dangerous factor, most agree, comes from a combination of physical phenomena: bat speed - the speed at which the bat slices through the air - and the "trampoline effect" - the way the ball bounces off the bat.

Unlike wood bats, which normally have a weight within a couple of ounces of the number of inches of the bat's length, a 33-inch aluminum bat weighs only 28 ounces. A 34-inch bat weighs only 29 ounces. The lighter the bat, the faster a batter can swing it.

"The minus-5 (difference between the length of the bat and its weight in ounces) is the critical number," says University of Massachusetts coach Mike Stone. "Once you reduce the difference, you're still going to have the trampoline effect, but it's not going to be as great because the bat speed created won't be as great.

"Kids can still hit with an aluminum bat that is minus-2 or minus-2.5, as opposed to wood, but you're really talking about a weapon when it's minus-5," Stone says.

Woods agrees with Stone's assessment.

"How much more of a factor would it be if the weight were moved up to slow the bat speed a little?" Woods says. "They wouldn't have to change the technology that much. The minus-5 should be banned."

Bill Thurston, baseball coach at Amherst College for 33 years and current editor of the NCAA Division I baseball rules committee, is considered the devil incarnate by the bat manufacturers.

"We've had a number of kids in the last few years (who were) hit in the face with line drives and hurt badly," Thurston says. "A ball comes off a wooden bat at 93-95 miles per hour. With aluminum, it goes up to 110-115 miles per hour, and sometimes as high as 120 miles per hour."

Thurston cites several statistics which, he believes, show more than just a change in the competitive balance of the game. He compiled statistics for 90 NCAA Division I players who had more than 70 at-bats using wooden bats in the Cape Cod League and 60 pitchers who threw at least 25 innings.

In NCAA play, those 90 hitters - using aluminum bats - averaged .339, with a slugging percentage of .551. At the Cape, their batting average was .232 and their slugging percentage was .325. There were 70 who hit over .300 in NCAA play and 35 over .350. In Cape Cod League play, none hit .350 or better and five hit .300 or better. The earned run average among the NCAA pitchers studied was 4.89. When they pitched at the Cape, it dropped to 2.79.

The most compelling number, though, might be the 62 home runs that were hit in 14 games in the College World Series this year in Omaha, Neb. The score of the final game of that series, by the way, was 21-14.

"The difference is the bat," Thurston said. "Balls and players are the same. Bat manufacturers argue that the players are bigger and stronger. Well, they must have lost a lot of strength during the summer" when playing in the Cape Cod League.

The fight between Thurston and the manufacturers is not a pretty one. Thurston alleges that the manufacturers have sneaked new products past the NCAA rules committee and produced false testing. James Easton, owner of Easton Sports Inc., says Thurston is a zealot on a crusade and implies the coach is in collusion with a manufacturer who is trying to market a Fiberglas bat.

According to Easton, the real danger lies in three areas: a livelier ball, a shrinking strike zone (which makes the pitcher throw pitches that are easier to hit) and the fact that pitchers don't wear protective helmets. The aluminum bat, Easton maintains, only serves to make baseball a more pleasurable experience for smaller players with less strength who would struggle with a heavier bat.

Bill Williams, spokesman for Louisville Slugger, said his company will do whatever it's told.

"Our response is that our bats meet the specifications set by the NCAA, high school federations, American Legion etc.," Williams says. "If they're too fast or too dangerous, that's up to the organizations to determine. Our position is that they're not, but it's our job to meet their specifications."

Williams notes that a change could even have benefits for the company. "If they changed the parameters, we'd have to retool, and it would be expensive and take a year, but we'd also be selling a lot of new bats," he says.

Easton said his company would make more money for a couple of years, but would then have to downsize because fewer people would play the game without the souped-up bats.

A switch back to wood would be expensive for baseball programs. Wood is far less expensive per bat with a price tag of $35 to $40, compared with aluminum's $210 to $300 per bat, but does not last nearly as long. And according to Thurston, there probably isn't enough bat-quality wood to satisfy the needs of the 750 colleges and 14,212 high schools playing baseball.

So aluminum bats are probably here to stay. It's only their form and composition that might change. It would be none too soon for Fran Towle.

"It makes me nervous about it happening again," Towle says. "You don't think about it until something like this happens. But now you realize it can happen. It's scary."