- posted
12 years ago
Cause of broken baseball bats uncovered
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- posted
12 years ago
You'd think they guys who've been making bats for a hundred years would know that. :-)
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- posted
12 years ago
We've been playing baseball with wooden bats for over a hundred years and working wood since prehistoric times. It does seem hard to believe that bat makers and the leagues were not already aware of something so basic. Well, good publicicty for the Forest Service anyway.
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- posted
12 years ago
It's also just damage control for MLB. One guy gets impaled every 50 years and suddenly it's epidemic. :-)
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- posted
12 years ago
OK, add the Forest Service to the list of "Waste, Fraud and Abuse" in the Federal Gov't, under the "Waste" category.
Your tax dollars at work. Lucky for the struggling billionaire MLB team owners that the gov't can help them out with such a critical job creation issue, or does this help the deficit?
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- posted
12 years ago
I'm sure they did/do. They also know that there's less wasted wood if you ignore grain direction.
I can't believe that the FPL got involved. You could show any high school kid in shop class three broken bats and they'd be able to tell you why they broke.
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12 years ago
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12 years ago
Sure. The games will never end, but yeah, they'll save bats. :-)
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- posted
12 years ago
Okay, how about wrapping a wooden bat in carbon fibre?
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- posted
12 years ago
How about waiting a week and everybody will forget about the problem that isn't. :-) (the carbon fiber to wrap one bat would cost as much as the wood for 40 bats.)
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- posted
12 years ago
But, but, but the flying splinters? Won't you think of the children?
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- posted
12 years ago
I know you're kidding around..... but I remember ducking broken bats at the old Cleveland Municipal stadium, when I was a kid.
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- posted
12 years ago
We might have the same problem here:
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- posted
12 years ago
Robatoy wrote the following:
Aluminum bats are not allowed in professional baseball. They can hit balls faster and farther than wooden bats. They would likely break all batting records set so far by wooden bats. There is more danger to the pitcher getting hit by a faster ball than a wooden bat. They sound like crap when hitting the ball. Clank, rather than Crack!
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- posted
12 years ago
What a sacrilegious blow it would be to major league baseball if they allowed that annoying "clank" to usurp the special sound of the wooden bat! The sound of that "crack!" is like music, and it defines part of the thrill of the game. You can tell by the sound how well the ball was hit, and everyone who hears it immediately formulates an idea of where it's headed and how far it will travel. The sound of an aluminum bat is like fingernails on a blackboard to a true fan of baseball.
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- posted
12 years ago
...
b) _can/could_ be made w/ similar or even lower coefficient of restitution to control/limit but current are somewhat more so, true. Have, however, reduced significantly from when initially introduced years ago. c) see b) d) true, if so e) true altho that too, has been modified it still isn't a wood bat (but new wood bats don't seem to sound as good uniformly as I recall, either. We have summer league team here that is wooden-bat league and just last night was thinking of how they don't seem quite the same for some reason).
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- posted
12 years ago
Not important, but just to point out.... "Aluminum" bats are pretty much a thing of the past. Non-wood bats are now a hodgepodge of composites, including aluminum, but mostly moving toward carbon fiber. Not only does this make it feel really good when you hit the ball nice and square, but it has the added benefit of producing a great "crack" sound very similar to wood.
I kind of wish we'd go back to straight up aluminum in softball. The new bats are well over 300 bucks and guys like me are hitting homers. I'm not a big guy by any standard, well, maybe in China or Mexico, but in any case... the older and weaker I get, the more home runs I hit. The new bats are like trampolines to the balls.
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- posted
12 years ago
Even though it is difficult to detect a 20KHz sine wave, the transient of an 'impact' has components way higher than that. It's a package of information that when you lob off everything above 8 - 10KHz due to age related (or other) loss of high frequency hearing, you will notice the difference.
I don't know your age or your exposure to industrial noise, but there's a good chance that the reason why those bats don't 'crack' so much is due to hearing loss.... assuming everything else reasonably constant.
BUT.. it could be the bats or even the finish on them.
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- posted
12 years ago
No, but 60 years ago when I picked up my first bat, my brothers instructed me to make sure the label on the bat was facing you. The label was placed on the bat so if it faced you when holding the bat in front of you, the grain would always be correctly oriented when you swung/swang/swunged the bat. The same guys that make bats today, made them then, and the US Forest Service, like most all government boondoggles simply wasted our hard earned money doing the study.
The problem with the bats breaking more than normal had nothing to do with grain direction, EVERYONE that ever played baseball with a wood bat had to know this. It did have something to do with the choice of wood for the bats.
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- posted
12 years ago
Yes, the wood. At the very end of the video posted by the OP there is a comment about low-density maple. Play it again and watch for it.....