Critics Trying to Find a Way to Foil Aluminum Bats

For a day, USC baseball Coach Mike Gillespie was a disarmament advocate, probably because the Trojans had just been bombed into the next millennium by eight home runs from Louisiana State’s “nuclear bats.”

“I think it’s abundantly clear that there has to be a change in the bats,” he said.

A week later, he was a realist, probably because USC had just hit five homers in beating Arizona State, 24-14, in the championship game of the College World Series.

“I never meant to sound as though I was critical of the aluminum bat,” he said. “This is the hand that we’re dealt.”

And the calls and letters keep coming in to the NCAA.

“It was an embarrassment to the college game,” said Bill Thurston, for 33 years the coach at Amherst and rules editor of the NCAA Baseball Rules Committee. “I felt sorry for the players.”

“It was brutal,” said Jim Darby in a bit of heresy, because he speaks for Easton, a Van Nuys firm that is the largest maker of the metal-bat bombs.

“It was a sign of the times,” Arizona State Coach Pat Murphy said.

And the times, if the American Baseball Coaches Assn. has anything to do with it, are changing.

On May 30, in a downtown hotel in Omaha just as the College World Series was embarking on a record-breaking voyage to Long Ball Island, the association’s board of directors agreed on a statement to the rules committee asking for new standards to muzzle the bats.

“What’s the most exciting thing in baseball to a lot of people?” asked association head Dave Keilitz. “It’s the home run, right?

“Well, when you hit three of them in an inning, people aren’t excited anymore. They’re starting to wonder what’s going on.”

And the times, if the bat manufacturers have anything to do with it, aren’t going to change all that quickly.

“Sure that [the championship] was a brutal game, but a week before, it was 12-10 [LSU over USC], and I met people in the parking lot who thought it was a great game,” said Darby. “And what about the Thursday and Friday games, 5-4 and 7-3 [both won by USC over LSU]? How do you figure them?

“And I’ve seen higher-scoring games than 12-10 in the American League, and nobody’s talking about changing the bats.”

The NCAA rules committee stands in the middle, asking the coaches “What kept you?” and charging the bat manufacturers with stonewalling tests that might show their products might not be good for baseball. Easton Chairman Jim Easton tends to be the lightning rod here, calling for a look at the ball, among other things.

Members of the rules committee are seeking evidence that assault and battery are being committed on baseballs by space-age weapons.

They can read that:

* College hitters were averaging 1.03 home runs per game midway through this season, the last period for which statistics are available, up from 0.96 last year.

* Earned-run averages are up to 6.14 from 5.93, which already was pretty high.

* Runs per team per game are up to 7.22 from last year’s 7.

* Fifty Division I hitters were batting .413 or better.

* And Division I pitchers were hit by line drives 173 times.

They can see Thurston’s study of last season’s players who went from college baseball to the Cape Cod League, a summer group that uses wooden bats. It shows:

* Hitters’ averages dropped 107 points.

* Slugging percentages dropped 225 points.

* Home runs dropped 67%.

* Earned-run averages dropped from the 5’s and 6’s to the 2’s and 3’s.

And they watched at Omaha, where:

* The record for homers--48, accomplished in 1995 with what were later found to be “superbats,” provided by manufacturers for the regionals and World Series--was shattered by this year’s 62.

* USC’s Seth Etherton gave up six homers in a game to LSU and was drafted No. 1 by the Angels three days later.

* Arizona State’s Ryan Mills was selected sixth overall in the draft and failed to survive the second inning against USC in the championship game four days later.

* USC won the championship with a team ERA of 6.23 and the average for all teams was 7.24.

There are enough numbers to clog a computer, but apparently they aren’t the right numbers.

“That’s anecdotal data and we have plenty of it,” said Ted Breidenthal, the NCAA’s liaison to the rules committee. “We need to define what actual performance is. I don’t know what it is. We need to take a strong look, and this is a trail that has never been blazed before.”

It could take at least 18 months to determine how fast the ball comes off a metal bat as opposed to a wooden one, to assess the trampoline effect: the recoil of bat and ball that sends the ball shooting off the bat, and to determine optimum bat diameter and length/weight ratio.

That ratio is five now, meaning a bat can be 34 inches long and weigh as little as 29 ounces, impossible numbers with wood, standard with metal.

An engineer, Joseph “Trey” Crisco III, is going to handle the research, which has to be better than the last test, in 1996. That involved shooting a ball at 60 mph out of a gun at a bat that was on a pendulum and measuring how far the bat and ball rebounded.

That virtually every college pitcher throws faster than 60 mph, and every batter swings a bit harder than a bat on a string seemed to have been lost in the process, which was later embarrassingly revealed to be more applicable for slow-pitch softball.

Aluminum bats have been a part of college baseball since 1974, and averages and home runs immediately began to rise, from .273 that year to today’s .305, though they have not fluctuated much since the .306 of 1985.

Rod Dedeaux, the former USC coach whose teams won the last wooden-bat College World Series in 1973 and first metal-bat title in ‘74, has hated the aluminum bats since their introduction.

“Look at this,” he said in Omaha last week. “The best two pitching staffs around, the best two teams in the country, and they give up 35 runs and 39 hits? That’s wrong.”

But the metal bats have been cost-effective, even as those costs have risen near $300 each, and even as the newer, lightweight alloys have become so thin that they have been battered flat in practice and games. They have remained a part of the college landscape, with “sweet spots” from tip to handle, as compared to those of wooden bats, which are about one inch by five inches.

But their performance has improved to a point at which many of their defenders have become their detractors.

There are about 150 Division I coaches under bat contracts to Easton, Hillerich and Bradsby, Worth and other bat manufacturers that pay them up to $80,000 and provide free bats for their players.

“But there were coaches with bat contracts on our executive committee that voted unanimously on the statement to the rules committee about new bat standards,” Keilitz said.

Added Thurston, who said he turned down something unheard of for a Division III coach--a bat contract-- because it would have involved a conflict of interest: “I’ve gotten calls from coaches who have said ‘I’ve got a bat contract, but something has to be done.’ ”

Some fear that the College World Series will provoke a rush to a rules change before the research is done, and there is a summit conference of bat manufacturers, college officials, high school officials and other interested parties in Kansas City on July 14 to head off such action at the pass.

Darby of Easton, who will mitigate any anti-metal bat statistic at the drop of a number, says he welcomes the process.

“We applaud what the NCAA is doing,” he said. “Let’s define what performance is. Let’s decide what we want. Are you trying to accomplish fewer home runs? Less scoring? Fewer people in the stands?

“Certainly, 21-14 is not acceptable. Maybe 12-10 is acceptable.”

And maybe when it all ends, Skip Bertman is right.

“Today’s game is changed,” said Bertman, the coach at LSU, the most recent of Easton’s 18 consecutive years of College World Series champions.

USC broke the streak with Louisville Sluggers by Hillerich and Bradsby.

“Kids lift [weights]. They lift a lot and they swing hard,” Bertman said. “The Wilson ball is tightly wound and the pros take a lot of the best pitchers from high school.”

And, added Bertman, after his Tigers were shut down by Etherton’s second-chance efforts: “If the pitcher is on a roll, I don’t care what kind of a bat they are using, the ball won’t be hit.”

Kernan Ronan is the pitching coach with the Angels’ Class-A affiliate at Lake Elsinore, and part of his job is helping players make the transition from aluminum to wood.

“The biggest thing is to get the college pitcher to learn to throw inside,” Ronan said. “He works away, away, away, because he knows that if he makes a mistake with the aluminum bat, the ball is going to be hit a long way.

“Here, he can throw an inside fastball and break the wood bat.”

And the real difference in the two games, besides the money paid the players, is philosophical.

“There,” said Ronan, “the idea is to miss the bat. Here, it’s to make the bat mis-hit the ball.”

It’s the game some of the college coaches want back. And many of them see it coming.

“We’ll still have aluminum bats, but we’ll see bats that play like wood,” Gillespie said. “They’ll be three ounces less than the length.”

And perhaps pitchers will swagger back to the mound instead of slinking when there is nuclear bat disarmament.

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Metal Maniacs

Offensive production has greatly increased since the NCAA switched to aluminum bats in 1974. A look (averages are per game per team):

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Year Avg. Runs HR ERA 1970 .262 4.96 0.40 3.34 1971 .267 5.28 0.46 3.47 1972 .266 5.01 0.44 3.35 1973 .266 5.07 0.42 3.46 1974 .274 5.33 0.49 3.79 1975 .273 5.38 0.50 3.76 1976 .282 5.65 0.55 3.91 1977 .286 5.83 0.62 4.22 1978 .288 6.08 0.66 4.37 1979 .289 6.09 0.62 4.42 1980 .295 6.22 0.66 4.59 1981 .300 6.52 0.74 5.05 1982 .298 6.39 0.69 4.95 1983 .297 6.44 0.76 5.02 1984 .295 6.41 0.78 5.06 1985 .306 6.94 0.92 5.51 1986 .301 6.79 0.89 5.42 1987 .299 6.72 0.89 5.38 1988 .297 6.53 0.84 5.29 1989 .289 6.15 0.67 4.94 1990 .290 6.07 0.66 4.88 1991 .294 6.30 0.73 5.11 1992 .291 6.18 0.68 5.10 1993 .288 6.08 0.72 5.10 1994 .290 6.24 0.69 5.16 1995 .289 6.20 0.70 5.19 1996 .294 6.48 0.77 5.47 1997 .304 7.00 0.96 5.93

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