[greymule]

I never hit a baseball with a metal bat. When metal softball bats first appeared (sometime around 1971 or 1972), not only did they hit the ball no farther than wood bats, they felt like a wood bat when you hit the ball. A "blindfolded" batter would not have known he was using a metal bat. (Some guys stuck with their favorite wood bat.)

How many times did I see a wood bat break and injure somebody? Zero in uncountable baseball and softball games. Today, even on some of the top SP teams, F1 and F5 wear lexan faceguards. Still, I've seen pitchers carried off in ambulances after a liner off the foot.

I quit playing SP more than 20 years ago, when there were no HR limits and it was difficult to hit a Dudley Day-Nite over a 300' fence, even with the metal bats that existed at the time. Today, guys in their 50s routinely "crush" balls" far over the same 300-foot fence whose warning track they couldn't reach at age 25.

As for the state regulating bats, I'm always wary when the government decides it's going to protect us all from ourselves. New Jersey politicians, for example, are now considering banning 50-caliber rifles as an "anti-terror" measure, on the basis of "you could shoot an airplane with this type of firearm." As if terrorists intent on shooting at airplanes couldn't procure whatever firearm they wanted, as if somebody couldn't pull over on the NJ Turnpike near Newark Airport and use a 30-06 with a scope to put a round through an aircraft windshield.

To me, the ideal situation would be if the governing bodies themselves regulated the metal bats so that they hit like wood bats. Then we'd have the best of both worlds.

Incidentally, to umpire the state Babe Ruth softball tournament last year, I had to join the BR association and learn their rules. It is interesting that as long as a bat meets the Babe Ruth specs for length, weight, circumference, and grip, it is legal. They have no list of illegal or banned bats. Therefore, the red hot Miken Ultra (with which ANYBODY can hit a ball 300 feet, or even titanium bats (banned in all other codes), are legal in Babe Ruth softball. (Also odd: all BR rules on baserunning are taken verbatim from the OBR book, except that they prohibit deliberate crashes when the fielder has the ball.)

My attorney insists that I append the following disclaimer:

NOTICE TO THE GOVERNMENT: I, greymule, do not advocate terrorism or shooting at aircraft or any other illegal target. I am, in the hopes that the great and powerful government will take appropriate action, merely calling attention to a method that terrorists might choose to employ. It is also possible that terrorists could use metal bats to attack government officials, so please get to work on that, too.

I trust the studies

Doing a truly scientific study costs a great deal of money. You need to hire experts in many fields, including statistics, and you have to have independent experts validate your findings. Of course, you can collect anecdotal evidence or gather what you think are valid statistics and call it a study, but I doubt that anyone—even the deep-pockets "National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research"—has ever done a valid scientific study of metal versus wood bats.