Ruth swung bats as heavy as 52 ounces in his career
August 29, 2018 9:40 AM   Subscribe

 
The Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory offers tours about every hour. They do respectable business, but you *definitely* notice how few modern stars use Sluggers these days. They talk on the tour quite a bit about Ash, the Ash Borer and the upswing in Maple. And how many more trees they plant than harvest (or their contractors do)

PS: If you ever do the tour, drop me a line, my office is a block away
posted by DigDoug at 9:57 AM on August 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


It's hilarious how this whole article talks about Barry Bonds and the mystery of what his magic thing was that let him hit the home runs. Was it the maple bat? No, dear readers, it was the steroids. "As Barry Bonds pursued the single-season home run record in 2001, no detail went uninterrogated." It took until 2003 for the interrogation to happen, the one where he perjured himself.
posted by Nelson at 9:59 AM on August 29, 2018 [10 favorites]


I had a maple bat as a kid (around 1988) and I had no idea they used any other type of wood. In fact, I will swear that the one fact I know about baseball is that maple has always been the preferred type of wood. I learnt it from a library book which also stated that maple was preferred because its sap made the handle slightly sticky which provided a better grip to the holder. (I also have a fuzzy memory of my knowledge of that coming to use in a game of Trivial Pursuit.)

It appears I've skipped across parallel universes again.
posted by popcassady at 10:28 AM on August 29, 2018 [3 favorites]


kinda weird how they say the big problem with maple is when it shatters it fails catastrophically but then a paragraph later it is casually mentioned how Jim Thome used one in BP because it would last all season? did i miss something obvious?
posted by Exceptional_Hubris at 10:35 AM on August 29, 2018


It rarely ever shatters, but when it does...Lookout!

In my wood bat softball league, I use a bamboo bat.
posted by AugustWest at 10:39 AM on August 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


It was a real problem when the maple first became popular. ( Google pics ) There were even suggestions to make a clear plastic shrink-wrap sleeve for them to hold the pieces together so no one got injured.
posted by Cris E at 10:45 AM on August 29, 2018


From the loose rules stated in the article, a cricket bat might be legal to use in baseball. I wonder if anyone’s tried that? Hitting a sphere with a cylinder-ish bat makes no sense to me in terms of trying to control where the ball goes.
posted by w0mbat at 10:45 AM on August 29, 2018


I'd never considered how much difference a bat would make, until I learned the hard way. Cue aluminum bat derail.

I'm still bitter about the time where the company softball teams for a seasonal employment gig, which is, I mean, about as close to the definition to 'casual/friendly games' as you can get between adults on this planet, I had where the one team that was composed of year round employees had an aluminum bat that was from an older version of the softball league's 'allowed' list.*

We got the memo something was up pretty quickly as they hit ball after ball way into the outfield. It even sounded different to the more experienced players on our team/bench/stands.

We asked to see the bat and cross referenced it, sure enough, it wasn't legit. They refused to stop using it because it wasn't a big deal. We said, ok, so let us use it for our at bats too if it wasn't a big deal. They said no, it was theirs. Remember these are grown as men and women who actually had tenure at the organization/location we were at whereas we were all seasonal employees from other locations in the park. That left us with the option to quit/forfeit or play on. We did the latter and lost. We figured out the reason why they won the tourney year after year, or at least one of the reasons anyway.

Honestly, political machinations excluded (both national and tribal for me personally) it's probably the worst and most disappointing adult interaction I've had, maybe in my entire life, simply for the fact that the base triviality of the situation would still bring out such a childish streak in a group of folks who are supposed to be adults.

*I don't know enough about baseball/softball to get into the weeds here but I'd assume it was something like this list, or a bat that was allowed one year but not in subsequent years as best I can recall from 10 years ago.

posted by RolandOfEld at 10:49 AM on August 29, 2018 [9 favorites]


"Softwood" is defined as that of a coniferous tree, generally. Having recently made a car body from american ash, I can tell you it is a very hard wood.

"Hard" maple is harder than ash, according to the Janka scale:
Hard maple, Sugar Maple.....1,450 lbf (6,400 N) 	
Ash (White).................1,320 lbf (5,900 N)
By about 10%, which is not insignificant, but definitely not the difference between "hard" and "soft".

A bat made of lignum vitae*, the size of a typical MLB bat, would be three times as hard and weigh twice as much.**

* It is not clear to me that you could actually make a bat out of lignum vitae, as the tree is small and I'm not familiar with how the grain runs. Turning it would be an adventure.
** Asides like this are why I am not invited to parties.

posted by maxwelton at 10:50 AM on August 29, 2018 [12 favorites]


w0mbat: "From the loose rules stated in the article, a cricket bat might be legal to use in baseball. I wonder if anyone’s tried that? Hitting a sphere with a cylinder-ish bat makes no sense to me in terms of trying to control where the ball goes."

Rule 3.02 (a) states:
The bat shall be a smooth, round stick not more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length. The bat shall be one piece of solid wood.
So, the round language would preclude cricket style bats. Although I believe there was some experimentation with flat front bats in the early days.
posted by Chrysostom at 10:56 AM on August 29, 2018


Plus the splice between handle and blade on a cricket bat and the lamination in the handle would violate the 'one piece of wood' part.
posted by N-stoff at 11:01 AM on August 29, 2018 [2 favorites]


A bat made of lignum vitae, the size of a typical MLB bat, would be three times as hard and weigh twice as much.

I have a PUG muddler made out of lignum vitae. It is extremely hard stuff.
posted by slkinsey at 11:30 AM on August 29, 2018


Over the past few years, to the traditional sounds of an American summer, the drone of lawnmowers, the smack of leather on ash, has been added a new noise...
posted by stannate at 11:52 AM on August 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


I used to read a lot of baseball history, and I remember a story -- can't remember the player or team anymore, but probably in the 1930s -- of a mediocre player who was suddenly zinging line drives all over the place. Opponents couldn't figure it out, until one day someone watched carefully after he dropped the bat -- and it rolled lumpily, like a flat tire. Turns out he had sanded a plane onto the surface, then lacquered it or something so the grain made it look like a cylinder. Bat confiscated, player suspended, end of hitting streak.

I've gotta track that one down again.
posted by martin q blank at 12:16 PM on August 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


It’s largely the same story with solid-body electric guitars, FWIW. Most of the old ones are ash, most of the new ones are maple. Except for all the ones that are, like, “Yes, I would like you to destroy a rainforest so I can overpay for a guitar, please.” (Which is way too many.)

Re: Bats, when did the cupped ends come into it? I never saw them when I was a kid, and now it seems they’re all like that. Is that because of the maple?
posted by Sys Rq at 12:17 PM on August 29, 2018 [3 favorites]


It is not clear to me that you could actually make a bat out of lignum vitae
Pete Seeger made his ridiculously long¹ banjo neck out of a billet of lignum vitae, and some quite large shaft journals were made of it. There certainly used to be large bits available. Its oiliness would likely make for a lousy bat, and replacing one would tax even an MLB salary.

¹: or if you're a tall banjo player like me, just right. Though I curse it every time I need to move the thing on transit.
posted by scruss at 2:21 PM on August 29, 2018


We asked to see the bat and cross referenced it, sure enough, it wasn't legit. They refused to stop using it because it wasn't a big deal. We said, ok, so let us use it for our at bats too if it wasn't a big deal.

Oh man flashbacks to every time we've been casually paintballing with terrible rental guns and a dude with a ludicrous high-powered thing shows up and asks to play but would never let us have a go at shooting him with it.
posted by xiw at 2:47 PM on August 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


Sys Rq: "Re: Bats, when did the cupped ends come into it? I never saw them when I was a kid, and now it seems they’re all like that. Is that because of the maple?"

According to this, it mostly dates from the late 60s, but it sounds like it had been discovered and abandoned a few times before that.
posted by Chrysostom at 3:08 PM on August 29, 2018 [1 favorite]


lignum vitae

Before we had plastics and machined aluminum and carbon fiber, lignum vitae was a premier engineering material. The first nuclear submarine used lignum vitae wooden bearings. There are aircraft carriers with lignum vitae shaft bearings in active operation today. I'm pretty sure there are hydroelectric dams with lignum vitae turbine bearings in current operation.

I haven't built anything out of lignum vitae, but I do a fair bit of wood engineering. At my job I build custom one-off robotics for a tiny not-robot-related startup. We don't have the facilities for a real machine shop, so instead of aluminum, sometimes I build robot parts out of wood.

Maple is great for making fixtures and jigs. It's hard and strong and fairly isotropic (for a piece of wood). But man, it's a lot of work to shape it. Sawing, sanding, and filing maple is awfully slow. It's so hard, the tools don't bite in and it feels like you're doing nothing at all. And if you take power tools to it, it burns very easily.

For less critical things that still need to be strong, I use birch, though ash would probably work great, too. Birch is often my interface between wood and metal. It has great screw holding power.

Wood is great stuff.
posted by ryanrs at 11:42 PM on August 29, 2018 [5 favorites]


(The reason ash is oft used for car body frames is that in addition to being strong and light (compared to steel), it has great holding power all the way out to the edges for fasteners. I ended up using machine screws for assembly, as the wood could be machined with a tap just like it was a metal, certainly well enough for a test fit and final fasten.)

The article mentions that the ball is going to fly due to a combo of bat weight and velocity...and everyone is now after velocity. It's tickling the back of my mind that it's something like the square of the weight but the cube of the velocity? Otherwise, it wouldn't matter if you hit the ball "slowly" with a monster bat or quickly with a lighter bat.

I suppose higher velocity means you have another 20th of a second to decide about a pitch...
posted by maxwelton at 12:40 AM on August 30, 2018


It's tickling the back of my mind that it's something like the square of the weight but the cube of the velocity?

Kinetic energy is 1/2mv^2, iirc.
posted by thelonius at 3:59 AM on August 30, 2018


« Older Dada Comes Full Circle   |   End time wines Newer »


This thread has been archived and is closed to new comments