Could Baseball Be Hazardous To Kids' Health?

By JIM SANDERS
Sacramento Bee


WARNING: Playing baseball is increasingly hazardous to kids' health.

That's the message from a California lawmaker who is proposing legislation to impose a three-year moratorium on the use of metal or composite bats in high school baseball games.

State Democratic Assemblyman Jared Huffman is pushing for a crackdown after Gunnar Sandberg, 16, was critically injured while pitching for MarinCatholic High School when he was struck in the head March 11 by a line drive from a player using a metal bat.

The San Rafael, Calif. lawmaker called the incident a wake-up call to protect pitchers from laser-like drives hit by "performance-enhancing metal bats" while they stand virtually unprotected less than 60 feet from home plate after releasing the ball.

"I think we can anticipate that if we don't step in at some point and do something, we're going to see more and more juicing of bats through new technologies," Huffman said.

Sandberg remained in critical condition Thursday in Marin General Hospital, spokeswoman Ashley Shah said.

Huffman said his three-year moratorium would buy time to explore options that could range from stiffer bat-performance standards to protective headgear for pitchers or a ban on non-wood bats.

Bat manufacturers and other opponents of a moratorium counter that claims of increased danger are nonsense.

"I think some people think that (bat makers) are like mad scientists in a laboratory trying to figure out how to make a potent, titanium, ultrasensitive bat -- and that's not the case," said Mike May, spokesman for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, the industry's trade group.

The governing bodies of college, high school and youth baseball already require bat manufacturers to meet a performance standard -- called a "ball exit speed ratio" -- that is designed to restrict the speed of a ball when struck by a bat.

Daniel Russell, who has conducted baseball-bat research as an associate professor of applied physics at Michigan's Kettering University, said studies show that faster line drives can be hit with metal or composite bats -- but not by much.

"Under the current rules, it's possible for a non-wood bat to hit a ball 5 to 6 miles per hour faster," Russell said.

For a pitcher, the difference in reaction time is less than the blink of an eye when the hardest-hit line drive from a wood bat is compared to the hardest-hit line drive from a metal or composite bat, Russell said.

Put simply, serious injuries are just as likely with either bat, he said.

"What makes news is when there's a tragic thing like a kid getting hit in the face or somebody dying," he said. "That's extremely rare."

Russell said that bat testing standards are changing in a way that will force metal and composite bats to perform even more like their wood counterparts.

The changes will be implemented in colleges in 2011 and high schools in 2012.

Huffman's office has not compiled statistics on the annual injuries that occur from wood vs. metal bats, and such figures were not readily available.

Huffman said there have been conflicting studies on bat performance. He said he has questions about the methodology used in some of them.

In 2002, the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission declined to issue a rule that all non-wood bats perform like wood bats. The agency found there was insufficient evidence to conclude that metal bats posed an "unreasonable risk of injury."

Seventeen deaths were attributed to impact with a batted ball, eight of them involving non-wood bats, during a 10-year period ending in January 2001, the federal agency said in a letter rejecting the request for a crackdown on non-wood bats.