EAB and Maple Bats and the NY Yankees vs. Rangers

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CJRages

CJRages

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Oct 20, 2009
248
Mid Missouri
Last night "Hall of Famer - Joe Morgan" was co-broadcasting for ESPN in game 4 of the ALCS between the Yankees and Rangers. He made a comment - after two broken bat plays occurred in a row - about how MLB needs to do something about these poor maple bats. He said something along the lines of 'there is not enough white Ash lumber out there to supply MLB thus players are forced into using maple bats. Is this because of the Ash Borer??? Anyone know??? (p.s. mid-west baseball fans love watching the Yanks lose :) )
 
I think thats alot of HOOEY! MLB can afford WHATEVER the players want. P.S.- Joe Morgan is (and always was) a Yankee HATER! Man, I hate that ignoramous! Go YANKS!
 
Thats crap. Most players prefer the maple bat as they believe it has more "pop". Ash is a little more forgiving. It wont break as easy and violently as maple. The maple is harder and less forgiving but because of that it gives the feel of having more pop. More players in MLB use maple bats just because thats what they prefer.
 
And because od EAB you would think there is plenty of Ash to make bats.....
 
oddly enough, I saw on the Disco-Very channel all about how they make bats on the How it's made show. Seems the stockpiles of wood have been there for years in many cases, so its not a whole lot of wood cut recently that goes into making the bats. Also, most of the bats for MLB are custom to the players specs for wood type and a host of other variables that all must be "within" the LB spec for bats, but it makes for a great amount of variation. I'm sure, for the money, it wouldn't matter to the players if they were using an extinct wood species, or a common one. Pretty nat watching a guy shape the bats by hand and eye, just checking with calipers to make sure he was on target. I'm willing to bet that swinging hard at an inside pitch, pulling the bat towards your gut and catching the ball just beyond the grip is the reason for most bats exploding......or termites.
 
So you are saying more players are swinging hard at inside pitches these days and therefore they are exploding more than they used to???

I will stick with the facts. Maple is harder than Ash. when it breaks it BREAKS!
 
.....and Joe Morgan is STILL an ignoramous!!!!
 
dannynelson77 said:
So you are saying more players are swinging hard at inside pitches these days and therefore they are exploding more than they used to???

I will stick with the facts. Maple is harder than Ash. when it breaks it BREAKS!
Click to expand...

I'm not discounting the wood type, just saying there are lots of variables to consider. It may be as simple as ash vs maple, but bats have always broken and things like bat speed, and deceleration, grip position, and center of gravity are also facts that probably end up helping or hurting one way or another. Kudos to the bat makers for figuring out a way to get you to buy more bats by making them out of maple if that is the case. Either way, i think its funny when pitchers have to duck,dodge or dive to escape the flying bat shards, so more broken bats please.
 
There is plenty of ash in central Maine. As a matter of fact, it makes up the majority of what we will be burning this year. My understanding is that the EAB has yet to make it into the Pine Tree State. A few of the trees have minor rot in the core but most of the ones I dropped this year were healthy.
 
There is a firearms site I also visit that was discussing Slab sawn wood vs. Quarter sawn and the flow of the grain and how it effects the breakage of bats. Apparently the grain flow at the spot of impact has a big influence on whether or not the bat breaks.
 
I read recently that 65% of the bats Louisville Slugger sends to MLB is Maple. The other 35% is Ash. The bats you see some what exploding are all Maple. Ash bats just dont explode like that.
 
.....and Joe Morgan is STILL an ignoramous!!!
 
wood-fan-atic said:
.....and Joe Morgan is STILL an ignoramous!!!
Click to expand...

Amen to that!

And just to add my two cents, he's a know it all as well. I can't stand watching the game when he is broadcasting.
 
Ran into old Joe at Cooperstown once, not only is he an ignoramous, hes unfriendly and surly, wouldnt give these two little kids the time of day never mind an autograph. He took quite a bit of heckling after blowing those two boys off.
 
Yes, Joe has a fantastically keen sense of the obvious. I love it when they give us a double-shot of know-it-all-ness when he's doing a game with his equally Yankee-hating,annoying,arrogant booth-mate Tim McCarver. Then I'm reaching for the Jim Jones kool-aid! What a self-righteous dillweed he is. My favorite baseball play-by-play/color guy has got to be Bob Costas.
 
The reason more MLB players are using maple bats has nothing to do with the availability of one species of wood over another. The properties of Maple allow the end of the bat to be hollowed out where ash would fail with such a design. The player is swinging a bat that weighs the same but is putting more wood into the sweet spot. In theory it is like corking a bat. They take useless weight off the end. The player swings it faster and the ball goes farther.
 
dannynelson77 said:
So you are saying more players are swinging hard at inside pitches these days and therefore they are exploding more than they used to???

I will stick with the facts. Maple is harder than Ash. when it breaks it BREAKS!
Click to expand...

WRONG! The Maple bats tend to shatter into shards much more often than the Ash. The density of the wood is not the only measure as to how it acts when a force is applied to it. There are various trees with very close densities that are used for very different things and split quite differently. Different types of grain and growth rates and uses. Watch some baseball and pay attention to which bats shatter...
 
CTwoodburner said:
dannynelson77 said:
So you are saying more players are swinging hard at inside pitches these days and therefore they are exploding more than they used to???

I will stick with the facts. Maple is harder than Ash. when it breaks it BREAKS!
Click to expand...

WRONG! The Maple bats tend to shatter into shards much more often than the Ash. The density of the wood is not the only measure as to how it acts when a force is applied to it. There are various trees with very close densities that are used for very different things and split quite differently. Different types of grain and growth rates and uses. Watch some baseball and pay attention to which bats shatter...
Click to expand...

WRONG! I think you need to pay more attention to what I have said on this thread. I am saying that the Maple bats are the ones shattering. Its a fact that Ash is a more flexible wood compared to Rock or Sugar Maple which is the Maples being used for these bats. I have watched about 170 games of baseball this year so i think i know what I am talking about. Pay attention to what I have actually said in this thread.....
 
Yet when felling a tree, I feel much safer cutting a maple than ash. Why? Because ash is notorious for splitting. That is also why very few 2 x 4's are cut from ash; the ends will split. So why would bats also not split (not explode, but just split)? I believe also that bowling pins are made from hard maple.
 
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