Joe - I agree with your assertion that bats and "juiced" balls may have as much to do with the explosion of home run numbers over the past two decades as performance-enhancing drugs ever did. My first thought, which occurred to me about 15 years ago, is that bat design is partially responsible. I bought a new Louisville Slugger to take to the batting cages. I immediately noticed that my hands were cramping after a few rounds of tokens in the machines; then I noticed that the handle was obviously thinner than my older, much too small and sentimentally retired wooden bat from Little League. Thinner handles lead to more whip action, thinner handles weigh less and shift the center of gravity toward the sweet spot, making a well-hit ball even more "velocitous." (I didn't make that word up, one of my assistant coaches did!
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Check out all the stuff about Ted Williams and his choice of bats. Everything he did, he did to remove an extra tenth of an ounce from his bat; he wanted thinner handles, drier wood, and wasn't he the first to experiment with the cupped-out ends? I have a picture in my screensaver of a moment of impact on one of his swings; the bat looks like a blurred banana, it has flexed so much. Can you imagine the catapult effect that would cause on a hit ball, when you get someone bigger, stronger and heavier (canseco, bonds, mcguire, etc.) swinging the bat, rather than the relatively slim Williams? So I think the move to slimmer handles on the bats has caused greater bat speed, more force, more homers.
And, as a natural result and consequence, more broken bats.
And, maple technology has improved enough that maple bats are no longer the heavy piano legs that they used to be. Yes, they are harder and can crush a ball. Ex. Bonds and others. Now, there is some concern that maple technology has changed the game. Obviously, it has.
Bamboo - I recently bought a bamboo bat for my son, a high schooler who wanted to work out in the cage with a wooden bat. (Ironically, he broke that 15-year-old Louisville Slugger of mine on his FIRST swing in the cage! So I got onto the web and ebay and looked up bamboo.) I was surprised to learn that bamboo bats are composites of three or four slivers fused together with glue and then turned on the lathe to form the bat. Bamboo provides the "feel" of ash or maple, but with the tensile strength of steel. A college coach, a friend of mine, said one of his players has been using the same bamboo bat in the cage for two seasons now, and it is still solid. No cracking or splintering. However, since a bamboo bat is a composite bat, I don't believe we will see bamboo in professional baseball. Doesn't the rule say a bat must be made from a single piece of wood?
Yes, I still have my first glove.