Vintage Baseball Glove Forum

Major League baseball better get a clue!
the lead sentence in this article "Someone's going to die at a baseball game. . . "
In Reds/Twins game yesterday, hitter's bat shatters and strikes the umpire in the head behind his mask. The umpire is down for 10 minutes. He's now out for the series. MLB has tried to regulate the Maple bats by testing but obviously this is not working. Barry Bonds got his homer record with a Maple bat, many players observed the success and have been emulating by using Maple wood. The wood shatters, period.
http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/news?slug=j ... bats050808

As a woodworker, I've experienced the ash and hickory wood as having a long open grain that will fracture upon a grain line pretty easily given the right conditions and a bat can stay somewhat intact. The maple is a really dense, closed grain wood with no obvious grain lines, so it really explodes when it shatters. I have been watching the Giants series lately and there are pieces flying everywhere when they break a bat.