July 27, 2013
MAJOR LEAGUE BILLETS:
Science Lowers Shattering Risk at Home Plate (FELICITY BARRINGER, 7/25/13, NY Times)In 2008, statistics show, 5,000 bats broke in hitters' hands, with 2,500 of those shattering in what wood technicians call "multipiece failures," and those in the line of fire call less printable names. Last year, the number of broken bats was down only slightly, but the number of shattered bats dropped to just over 1,200.
The change is the result of an unusual partnership between Major League Baseball and the Forest Service, whose scientists looked deep into maple's core to find why it was so brittle, and how it could be made less so. Giving up the wood entirely was deemed out of the question.
As David E. Kretschmann, the Forest Service scientist who led a team of colleagues working on the maple mystery, said, "If someone's making millions of dollars using a certain thing, they're not going to mess with it."
What Mr. Kretschmann's team told Major League Baseball's equipment specialists is that it was harder to follow the orientation of the grain of maple wood than of ash. In ash trees, the veinlike vessels that carry water up through the trunk are larger and arrayed in clear, almost regimental form in the growth rings.
In maple trees, these vessels are smaller and scattered through the dense wood fiber nearly randomly. This makes them harder to see, and harder to follow when carving billets -- the round cylinders that are carved into bats -- out of a tree. The more that the wood grain in the cut wood deviates from its original slope, the more shatter-prone the bat, he said.
With Mr. Kretschmann's information in hand, baseball changed the specifications for its maple bats.
Posted by Orrin Judd at July 27, 2013 11:01 AM
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