Aluminum baseball bats continue to raise concerns for some in youth baseball leagues. But the Little League — the largest of youth leagues — says the metal bats are as safe as wooden bats.
Some parents, coaches and league administrators have argued that baseballs fly off of aluminum bats at a greater speed than wooden bats, putting players at a greater risk of injury.
“Aluminum bats are definitely more dangerous,” said Jamie Frank, president of the Jamesville-Dewitt Little League. “It’s not something that can be detected with the naked eye, but it should still be up for discussion.”
Frank’s philosophy puts him at odds with Little League’s staunch opposition to aluminum-bat bans. Frank is not fighting Little League’s leadership nor is he pushing for a ban locally. But, he says, he would welcome a change if the switch to wooden bats became mandatory.
The aluminum bat controversy has intensified in Little League baseball since the New York City Council approved a ban on aluminum bats in the city’s high school baseball games last year. The Council attempted legislation to extend the ban to all of the city’s youth leagues, but the bill failed. There has been no attempt at a local ban.
In an interview, Chris Downs, a spokesman for Little League Baseball, dismissed New York City’s ban. He also argued that a league-wide ban on aluminum bats would never happen.
“Where it’s been proposed by the government, it’s failed,” he said. Bans have failed in New Jersey, Ohio, Illinois and Pennsylvania, Downs said.
Little League Baseball oversees more than 7,000 leagues worldwide. In the last year, it has aggressively maintained its stance that aluminum bats are just as safe as wooden bats.
In resisting bans on metal bats, the organization points to a consistently low injury rate of pitchers hit by batted balls. Since 1995, there have been fewer than 100 injuries in a year, according to injury reports on Little League’s Web site.
League spokesman Downs argued that 100 injuries in a year is remarkably low, considering the number of Little League participants. He also argued that the injuries cannot be blamed solely on aluminum bats.
“That data we’ve recovered provides no direct correlation between these injuries and the use of aluminum bats,” Downs said. “There really is no viable data that says these bats present a greater risk for the players.”
But Frank, the Jamesville-Dewitt Little League president, suggested he would be happy to support a mandatory switch from aluminum to metal bats, despite the high costs in replacing the existing bats and replacing broken wooden bats.
“It would be really expensive,” Frank said. “That’s where the main opposition would come from. We’d have to replace all of the wooden bats that would break, get brand new ones.”
But the majority of those costs would be the responsibility of parents, Frank said, because Little League does not provide equipment for its players.
Taxpayers could foot the bill in the form of state grants, Franks said. The J-D Little League has won many state grants for projects. The most recent came last year when the league received $15,000 to repair its fields.
But Frank suggest the costs, no matter who pays them, would be worth it. Despite the lack of data suggesting otherwise, he is confident a switch to wooden bats would keep the players safer.
“If they used aluminum bats in the major leagues, you’d be able to see the difference,” he said. “The ball goes so much faster off of these bats.”
(Heath D. Williams is a junior newspaper major.)
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