Editorial: The crack of the bat

Saturday, May 12, 2007 | 7:22 a.m.

C ollege baseball fans will hear a rare sound this weekend in the Scenic West Athletic Conference baseball championship series in Henderson - the crack of wooden bats.

As reported in Thursday's Las Vegas Sun by Rob Miech, the Scenic West, the Community College of Southern Nevada's conference, is one of the few college leagues to use wooden bats instead of the ubiquitous aluminum bats that have been the mainstay in college and high school baseball since the 1980s. The major factor for the switch at the time was cost - aluminum bats don't break.

Things, however, have changed and many amateur leagues are considering returning to wood. Coaches and parents are concerned about the safety of players, especially pitchers who have less reaction time to a ball coming off an aluminum bat.

The New York City Council last month voted to outlaw minors from playing with aluminum bats, citing safety concerns. Bat makers are behind a federal lawsuit urging a judge to overturn the ordinance, which is not surprising considering a top-of-the-line aluminum baseball bat costs $379 compared with the $79 top-shelf wooden bat.

The issues are surprisingly complex. While coaches and players see a clear difference, bat makers point to laboratory tests, sanctioned by the NCAA, and say those tests show their aluminum bats are roughly equivalent to wooden bats.

Also, there is conflicting research as to whether aluminum bats are more dangerous.

But let's leave aside the debate over whose laboratory tests are better and get to the heart of the matter: To us one of the glories of baseball is that it is rooted in tradition. Although steroids may have inflated the statistics, the game is played much the same way as it was a century ago and, at the professional level at least, wooden bats have been the standard.

We would rather hear the crack of the bat than the metallic ping of one.