Every baseball player seems to have a story about a close call with the game’s newest nemesis, the airborne bat barrel.
“Second game of the year in Cleveland,” White Sox reliever Matt Thornton recalled. “I threw the pitch, snapped the bat in half. The ball was coming toward me and the bat was coming too. I went to field the ball and the head of the bat actually went into my glove.
“The ball squirmed through my legs. They called it a hit instead of an error. I’d rather have the error. Cost me an earned run.”
Pirates hitting coach Don Long would like to find some humor in his story too. Even if he could, he has only half a smile to use.
Long suffered a gash to the left side of his nose and just above his lip when whirling wood became a near-lethal weapon. The sharp end of the bat not only left a nasty scar, it damaged a nerve that left part of his upper lip without feeling.
“The ball (off Nate McLouth’s bat) was hit down the right-field line and I was following the ball and didn’t even see the bat break,” Long recalled during a recent stop at Wrigley Field. “It hit me and I saw the blood coming out.
“I was lucky. It could have hit me in the eye.”
Lucky? Because a sharp piece of shattered maple, from what is supposed to be a game, sliced into him 2 inches away from blindness? That’s lucky? Real “luck” would be never having it happen in the first place.
“The problem I have is that I watch every pitch of the game, but the fans are visiting and talking,” Long said. “They don’t see foul balls, so a lot aren’t going to see the bat coming.
“We played the next series after I got hit [at Wrigley] and one flew over our dugout. It hit a guy in the head, bounced off him and cut a guy in the forehead with the other end of it.”
The problem has become so prevalent that Major League Baseball has ordered an investigation — for a second time — of why maple bats are snapping and barrels are whirly-birding all over the park.
‘Like throwing javelins’
Traditional — but now less popular — ash bats crack, of course, but they don’t seem to become soaring sabers.
“When [maple bats] come apart, there’s barely any handle left,” Long said. “It’s a spear is what it is. It’s like throwing javelins.”
Infielders and pitchers are particularly at risk.
“Usually when you hear the bat crack and it starts flying, your main concern is that bat, as opposed to the ball,” said White Sox third baseman Joe Crede. “I’ve seen them stick in the ground like lawn darts.
“It’s a matter of time before something bad happens, before the sharp end of the bat hits somebody.”
White Sox designated hitter Jim Thome, who primarily uses maple bats, acknowledges “breaking a lot, I mean a lot” of bats this season, maybe an average of one every two or three games.
“And when they break, they slice,” Thome said. “It’s not like before. I was a big ash guy and they would just break in the handle. Now they slice. It’s crazy.
“You don’t want anybody to get hurt. There are little kids who sit up front. You just never know.”
The Cubs’ leader in creating splinters is Reed Johnson, who, of course, uses maple bats and seems to break about one per game.
“I don’t know if I have a bad batch or what’s going on,” he said. “If you have a problem like that, you usually let the bat company know and they will try to make an adjustment. If they don’t, you try to go somewhere else [for bats].
“There are so many companies, you don’t know what you’re getting,” teammate Ryan Theriot said. “A good friend of mine owns a [maple] bat company. They hand-pick their wood. But you have 40-50 companies that are licensed.”
Maple bats became popular in the late 1990s and then exploded in popularity after Barry Bonds blasted his record 73 home runs in 2001 with maple. On some teams as many as three-quarters of the hitters use maple.
Players cite the maple’s hard exterior and (believe it or not), their durability.
Very few want to switch back to ash, and it appears the players’ union will be on their side if MLB ever tries to outlaw maple.
The sides are united in working for solutions through a health and safety committee, meeting for the first time in June.
“We are very concerned about the safety of maple,” MLB spokesman Pat Courtney said.
“They have to do something,” Long said. “If it were a couple of times a week that it happened, it would be different. But it’s strange if you don’t see it two or three times in a game. It’s every day. Something has to be done.
“I understand the psyche that goes into [players sticking with maple]. If you think it’s going to perform better, it probably will. But at the same time there has to be a way to make a more effective product.”
“More effective” would translate into less breakage and certainly a shorter flying distance for the barrel end.
Guillen concerned
Everyone agrees times have changed, even if they don’t agree on the ultimate solutions.
Stressing “something is wrong here [and] it’s dangerous,” White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen already has talked to MLB officials.
“What are they going to do about it? Nothing,” he said. “The only thing they can do is [autograph those that broke], put them on eBay and make money back and buy more bats.”
Guillen recalls players from his era using “one dozen or two dozen” bats in a year.
“Now I go to the bat room and [Paul] Konerko has 40 dozen, all these guys have three-, four-, five-, six-dozen bats.”
They, obviously, need them the way bats are breaking, although — and despite Guillen’s hyperbole — Konerko uses far fewer than most. He also uses both ash and maple, depending on the feel.
Of course, when Guillen played for the Sox, basically only two companies made bats. Ash bats.
Padres Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn once used a bat, nicknamed the Seven Grains of Pain, for an entire season. Former Cubs manager Jim Frey, a very good minor-league hitter, used to soak his new bats in old motor oil believing it made them stronger and denser. Ron Santo remembers nailing a cracked bat because he was superstitious about a hitting streak.
“I would go on a three-town road trip with the bat I was using, plus an extra one or two,” Cubs manager Lou Piniella said. “If they broke, well then, whatever the clubhouse guy had for me.
“I wouldn’t want the bat bill now (about $65 apiece). These bats are much more expensive and they just absolutely shatter, they explode. I don’t know what it is, but I’ll tell you, there are about a half-dozen [broken] a night. It’s a dangerous situation.”
Guillen said: “I’m serious. This is scary. A couple of guys have misplayed the ball because the bat is coming with the ball.”
During the Cubs’ last homestand, third baseman Aramis Ramirez bent to field a ground ball to his left, and then saw 2 feet of sharp-ended barrel helicoptering a foot to his right.
“I dropped the ball because I was worried about the bat,” Ramirez said. “I dropped the ball and picked it up and got the guy out. When [bats] break, I’m one of the closest guys [to home plate].”
Ramirez uses maple himself.
Fellow third baseman Crede recalls a game in which the ball and barrel were both coming toward him. Right in front of him, the ball touched the flying bat again. He also remembers a spring training game in Scottsdale when he was sitting on the far end of the first-base dugout, daydreaming because he wasn’t playing:
“[Nick] Swisher was hitting right-handed and everybody yells, ‘Look out.’ I look up and see the ball and all of sudden — whack. The [barrel] squared me up right in the kneecap. The whole night I was limping around.
“I could have been sitting there looking at it stuck in my leg. And that’s a long dugout.”
Once in Baltimore, Konerko said, “the ball was coming in my direction and I peeked up at it and wound up making an error. I wasn’t going to get hit in the face with a bat or have the sharp end stick in me.”
The Cubs’ Mark DeRosa, a maple user, says the possibility of getting hurt “goes through your mind, the way the barrels come flying off. I get more scared for the people in the stands. We’re able to react and see it.”
Long believes rule changes would come quicker if some high-salaried player or pitcher was cut in the arm, as Rick Helling was in a minor-league game, or the face, as Long was. Or if a fan were to threaten a lawsuit after a projectile pierced him at more than the legal speed limit. (When bats started flying in force about three years ago, MLB required distributors to carry $10 million in liability insurance.)
The “fan problem” is accentuated more at Wrigley Field than at U.S. Cellular Field because of the proximity of the seats to the playing field. And it is highlighted even more because of what appears to be the soaring number of soaring bats.
“I think we lose more bats than balls in the games,” Guillen said, only partly in jest.
Quirks of maple
No one seems quite sure of the “whys” of the maple bat explosion, although foresters, lathers and physicists will have a say in the end.
DeRosa, teammate Derrek Lee and White Sox outfielder Jermaine Dye believe weather is a factor because, in theory, maple dries out faster.
“I think the cold here has something to do with them breaking early,” Lee said. “When it’s warmer, there’s a little more give in them.”
“I used one I hadn’t used in a year because it felt good,” DeRosa said after the bat completely shattered. “I was mad at myself for using it. It just seems like they dry out if you don’t use them for a while. But I’m guessing.”
Some in the wood business believe raw maple needs to be chosen very carefully because hidden defects could cause breakage.
And many believe modern players like lighter bats — or at least bats that feel lighter — with thin handles and big barrels. The disparity in the size of the barrel end and handle end, therefore, causes the bat to snap, or shatter, especially when a 95-m.p.h. fastball hits the very end of the bat and causes an unbalanced teeter-totter effect.
“The ones with big heads and skinny handles, those are going to break a lot,” Konerko said. “I’ve never really had a problem with [maple] breaking, but I don’t use one with a big barrel. Nine out of 10 times when you see a bat helicoptering on the field it’s a big-headed bat with a skinny handle.”
That apparently is what the management/labor safety committee will focus on.
“I don’t know if we are talking about banning the maple bats as much as having a weight ratio of the bat and the size of the handle,” MLB’s Courtney said.
Everyone seems to have a theory. And, of course, a story, some of which are creepy.
The Sox’s Brian Anderson, who uses maple, watched his bat fly over the dugout, where one of his friends was sitting. The friend ducked in time and another fan caught the brunt of the bat.
“My advice to fans, no matter how your good seats are, if you’re not going to be locked in for 27 outs on each side, you either should be in the outfield or behind the net,” Anderson said.
“I don’t want to call people stupid, but it’s not smart when families bring kids and sit right behind the dugout. People buckle their kids [into cars] and keep them from harm’s way, and then they come to a baseball game and let them sit [close].”
Has it come to this? That baseball will have to put up netting, as the NHL did after the death of a 13-year-old fan who was struck by a puck? Insiders insist not, and that is why MLB and the Players Association have commissioned the newest study.
Long hopes action will be taken before another injury similar to his occurs. He would like the end of his story to be a happy one — with an entire smile attached to it.
“My understanding is that if the nerve was severed completely, the only way to rectify it is to pull the dead nerve out and implant a new one,” he said. “If it was cut and not severed, it will regenerate [itself] back to your spinal cord and regenerate. That could be a six-month process, which I’m fine with … if I get the feeling back.”
———-
dvandyck@tribune.com
