Crack of outdoor bats better than alloy ‘tink’

By John Gilbert

With so much focus on the Minnesota Twins and the wonders of outdoor baseball in their new Target Field, one additional feature is worth mentioning: The unmatched “crack” that occurs and resonates when a hardwood bat strikes a horsehide-wrapped baseball.  Until this season, the only sounds high school or college or youth baseball fans could hear outside for three decades was the “tink” of an aluminum alloy bat as it struck the same horsehide sphere.

We’ve been blessed with a gentle March and April this year, and the “tink” of aluminum bats striking baseballs has been common once again throughout the state at high school and college games. Maybe the sound is even more dramatic if you head up I-35 to Duluth, where such a mild spring is flat out astonishing.

A  lot of pitched baseballs have become blurs as they zipped off those alloy bats when St. Scholastica filled Wade Stadium with the pings and tinks of solid hits. The same thing happened up at UMD, where the Bulldogs battled through Northern Sun games, plinking shots all over the field.

Thanks to Target Field, the sound of Major Leaguers like A.J. Pierzinski hitting with a wood bat has returned to Minnesota's outdoor scene.

Softball has used aluminum bats for a few decades now, and even though softballs are misnamed, because they are so hard that it’s amazing more people don’t get bruised from playing infield with such short bases. Softball got metal bat-makers to launch baseball into a netherworld of technology that has made a serious impact on all levels short of the pros.

St.  Scholastica has gone on to win its 14th straight UMAC title, spraying line drives off those ultra-high tech alloy bats. We might pause, however, and wonder how long that will continue.  Consider amateur baseball. Alloy bats also had taken over in senior men’s baseball, wher,  in the Twin Cities area, there are four different leagues for 35-and-over players of real-baseball, who refuse to give up the fun of baseball at any age.

Participating in those leagues makes the technical advances easier to trace. I can still remember as a kid, the sting caused by hitting an inside pitch on one of those frigid, early-spring days declared as the high school baseball season in Duluth. Those usually comfortable Louisville Slugger orAdirondack wood bats could sting your hands pretty good at 40 degrees. You could break a bat, and replace it for about $10, which was nice, but when metal bats came in,  the savings were impressive. The sound was annoying at first, but it grew to have a distinct resonance, even if it couldn’t possibly match that “crack” of wood bats. Still, they’d never break, which made up for the lack of feel, and that lack of feel also meant the lack of sting when it was cold.

In the Over-35 leagues, there young pups who had never used wood bats, because metal bats have been there since they were kids. Along the way, bat companies such as Easton, Louisville, Worth, and others, pretty much refined their product almost by the year, and raised their prices accordingly. They reached a perfect balance, I thought, at the level numbered “C-405,” I thought. They felt good, the balls came off them a little quicker than wood, but never dangerously heightened in velocity.

Then, however, the companies realized they could make more money by making better bats out of higher-tech alloys, which they had been doing for years in softball. Various baseball leagues around the country didn’t notice at first, but those of us playing did. As the code numbers of alloys rose, and the prices skyrocketed, bats that were made of what I call “unobtainium” became the norm. On my team in the Twin Cities, good, solid ballplayers asked me if I’d place them anywhere but third base, because balls were whizzing at them too fast to react to. I ended up playing third myself, sometimes by default, when my shortstop range seemed to go away faster than my reaction times.

At league meetings, I entered a motion to consider limiting the alloy’s pop by seeking a restriction at that C-405 level — bats that every team already had, costing about $100 apiece, and which lasted forever. Those bats didn’t scare fielders away with concern over velocity, which became significant the way pitches zapped off the high-grade, aircraft-quality alloy. I was shouted down by a vocal minority, guys who had invested $400 in their trick bats, and wanted to keep using them.

My reasoning was based on safety as well as fairness. If a pitch will ricochet off a bat with increasing velocity depending on how exotic the metal is, we would all be better off with a safe and inexpensive alternative, and nobody should be able to purchase a personal advantage simply by spending more for the latest and most sophisticated bat. Sticking with the C-405 alloy would, as they say, level the playing field.

Perfectly balanced, high-tech alloys reach the possibly dangerous level of 'unobtainium.'

A pretty good controversy followed, leading to a split in one league by nearly half the teams, when the main part of the league decided to switch to wood bats. The rebels wanted to keep using metal bats, and the issue came up again when my team went with them, and I pursued my motion to try to outlaw the costliest unobtainium weapons in the newly formed league. One other manager suggested that if I was afraid to play third base, I should get out of the game. That’s what happens when the 35-year-olds seem to get younger every year. I replied that I was making the motion to lessen the potency of the bats — as well as the cost — before someone got seriously injured. I went so far as to claim that as soon as we had a serious injury, we would see things more reasonably but it would be too late.  I lost, however, so we played on.

That season, a team managed by an adamant supporter of the highest-tech bats  was playing when an opponent armed with one of those unobtainium weapons hit a rocket down the first base line. The first baseman tried to throw his glove up, but the ball deflected off the top of his web and hit him flush in the eye. He was rushed to a hospital and, after lengthy hospitalization for repeated surgeries, his vision has never recovered fully. The manager was transformed overnight, suddenly leading the charge to switch to wood bats immediately.

Interestingly, a good wood bat now costs from $30 to $90. There are a couple of companies that make them in Minnesota. Max Bats are proliferating even up to the major league level. Lambrecht Bats are another company, made by a fellow who used to play in the Over-35 league, and now makes bats that hang in the converted garage at his farmland south of Jordan. He makes bats of varying styles and sizes, out of ash, the staple of baseball bats for a century, or out of stronger maple. He has some made of birch, which has odd grain, but is also stronger than ash. To me, each one is a work of art, and I’ve gone to his place several times just to heft and grip and swing a variety of his wares before selecting some.

It can get expensive, using wood bats. One player who joined our team in midseason, borrowed and broke bats with his first three swings. Players used to aluminum have to learn to hit the ball on the barrel, if possible, and to hold the trademark in a position so the ball hits properly on the grain. But over the past two seasons, the teams have adapted well. In fact, it’s a more enjoyable game when every hit is less than a rocket. Balls are hit for less distance, and put much more of a premium on pitching and defense. Plus, we are back to realizing how fantastic that “crack” of the bat sound is.

St. Scholastica's Chad Peterson sent the sound of alloy-on-horsehide resonating around Wade Stadium with a base hit during the Saints UMAC tournament.

College and high school ball games are highly enjoyable, although the “ping” or “tink” of the super-trick aluminum bats sounds more unusual now that so many amateur leagues have switched to wood. There are quite a few home runs socked by teams such as UMD and St. Scholastica, which bolsters enthusiasm, and we can continue to hope that nobody on any team will get hit by one of those missiles.

The entire subject came to me anew when I spent a couple of days test-driving the new Ford Fiesta in the hills near San Francisco a few weeks ago. The San Francisco Chronicle carried a sports story that caught my eye. It said the North Coast Section high school baseball managers were meeting to determine whether to outlaw metal bats for the upcoming playoffs.

The reason for the movement is that on March 11, Marin Catholic-Kentfield pitcher Gunnar Sandberg, a sophomore, was critically injured after being hit in the head with a line drive. He was kept in a medically-induced coma for three weeks, and only recently got up and is walking, with assistance, in a San Francisco hospital. The Marin County Athletic League, where Marin Catholic plays, immediately banned metal bats for the rest of the season. The Bay Counties League West, which also plays in the North Coast Section, followed up and did the same. The Diamond Sports National Classic in Orange County — one of the largest spring tournaments in the nation — also banned metal bats.

The San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s donated more than 200 wood bats to Marin Catholic after Sandberg’s injury, and while wood bats might be hard to find in the area, the safety of high school athletes is foremost. Something like 76 teams could suddenly need a supply of wood bats is league officials agree to such a ruling. It would be for this spring’s tournament only, although legislation by the National Federation of State High School Associations would be closely monitoring it. It is more than just possible that a three-year ban will follow, leading to permanent bans on non-wood bats.

I’m sure there also have been some serious injuries in Minnesota as well, I just haven’t seen them chronicled. I would welcome anyone who knows of any to send me an email notification ( jg7@jwgilbert.com). If there haven’t been any — good. But we’re dealing with what appears to be an inevitability.

Enjoyable as it’s been, watching teams in college or high school swing hard and, with a resounding “tink,” rifle those blurred laser hits so impressively, I will try to store the sound of those sophisticated metal bats in my memory bank. Because wood bats are going to come back to high school and college baseball — in California first, maybe, but around the country, and here in due time. And we’ll all be better off when those $400 unobtainium bats are, well…unobtainable.