Bats should crack, not skulls

Sporting News, The, June 24, 2002 by Armen Keteyian

The ball left the bat of Stanford's Chris Carter dead on a line, like a rifle shot, and went right over the pitcher's head, rising with the roar of the NCAA college baseball Super Regional crowd. Flat as a beam of light, it never wavered, screaming over the 20-foot fence in center field, 400 feet away.

Anthony Reyes was on the mound for USC, but I thought instead of Ben Birk. A University of Minnesota pitcher, Birk was hit in the face last year by a 101 mph drive, a rejected slider he thought he saw coming. "My body went into shock a little bit," Birk says. "What kind of freaked me out was all the blood that was pouring out of my nose. I had never seen that before."

Neither had John Anderson, now in his 21st year as the Golden Gophers' coach. "My first thought was, `Is he conscious?' Then `How much damage?'" says Anderson.

"`Is he dead?'" I ask.

"Yeah," Anderson says. "`Is he dead?'"

No, but Birk had three fractures of his left frontal sinus--his eyebrow bone--and his nose was pushed a half-inch to the right. Doctors cut across his head, peeled his face back and put in three titanium plates and 25 screws. "I know it sounds pretty serious," says Birk. "But I'm telling you, it could have been a lot worse."

You might think about that as you watch the College World Series head toward its championship game Saturday.

Jack MacKay joined Louisville Slugger in 1989 and was put in charge of designing a high-performance aluminum bat to catch industry leader Easton. Mixing space-age alloys and creative engineering, MacKay developed high-priced, high-profit models that left wood in the dust. He since has found a form of baseball religion.

"This is the kind of technology you ought to be throwing at bin Laden, not some baseball pitcher," he says today. "We've over-engineered it. It's the worst thing I ever did. Aluminum bats and wood bats are not even in the same ballpark."

The folks at Louisville Slugger and Easton, leaders in a $150 million-a-year business, don't much care for MacKay or for that kind of talk. They attack MacKay's credibility, charging that he has been waging a "personal vendetta" against his former employer and has a "strong, personal economic interest" in criticizing the safety of aluminum-bat companies.

It's true: MacKay owns a new company that makes wood bats. He stands to make big bucks if aluminum crumbles. He doesn't hide from any of it. "A lot of people say I'm just trying to get into heaven now to make up for what I did," MacKay says. "But don't buy my wood bat. Buy somebody else's, but go with the safe stuff."

Bat companies point to the NCAA's annual injury report ranking baseball as one of the safest collegiate sports. The report also shows "there is no ... significant increase in batted ball injuries." But last December, after an 18-month study, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission released a report that called the NCAA's injury statistics "inconclusive ... and not complete enough" to determine whether current aluminum bats are more dangerous than wood.

"Let's be honest," says Anderson. "Bat manufacturers have been wonderful for college baseball. So you get caught up in that, the free product, the fact it's saving you money. But all of a sudden I see my young man lying on the ground, and I'm going, `Is this the right thing?'"

Birk and many others were struck--and in some cases nearly killed--by balls hit off aluminum bats certified by the NCAA and the national high school federation. To be approved, an aluminum bat must not cause a batted ball to travel any faster than the best wood bat does. But there's a catch: Bats are tested in a laboratory on a machine set at a 70 mph pitch speed and a 66 mph swing speed. Why not test at far more realistic numbers, say, 85 mph pitches and 80 mph swings?

Simple, says MacKay: "It would scare people to death."

Why? Reaction time. Experts say the fastest batted ball a pitcher can defend against is about 97 mph. Translation: Less than four-tenths of a second.

Ninety-seven mph also is the fastest a ball can be hit by a certified bat in the lab test. Sounds safe, right? But what about on the field? Well, it turns out nobody officially tests balls hit by aluminum bats under game conditions.

"We've seen some things on our radar gun--108 miles per hour, 110 at different times," says Anderson. "I've witnessed 114 myself. Makes you question whether we are doing the right thing."

I wanted to ask the NCAA about this and more but it refused comment. I also wanted to speak to the one man in the one lab that does all the testing, Professor James Sherwood at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell. But on the advice of university counsel, Sherwood decided not to deal with Real Sports.

Still, Sherwood sure did some talking back in February 2000, when he wrote a memo to the NCAA saying he was "genuinely concerned that someone is going to get seriously hurt and potentially killed" with a bat certified in his lab.

Sherwood also said in a recent brief phone interview with Real Sports that he now has a "better understanding" of the situation but has "no public position on the safety of the bats."