Why are aluminum bats used in collegiate baseball? Are they used in minor league baseball too?
What’s the difference between aluminum and wood bats, anyway?
Doesn’t the switch make it tough on players to transition from collegiate to pro ball?
Aluminum bats are used in college and minor league play because they can’t break.
Wood bats are expensive for the limited budgets at those levels.
Aluminum bats also hit the ball farther especially off the handle.
Don’t know about the transition.
Cost. There is probally many reasons, but buying wood bats every time one breaks becomes costly over the season. No. In rookie league wooden bats are used.
They allow faster bat speed thru the hitting zone, and have a larger sweet spot.
Yes.
So how do the stats match up, say, with a kid who hits .325 in his college team and comes to the minors? Is he going to hit less for a long time?
How about slugging %? Is someone who hits a lot of long balls in college going to hit a lot of infield flies and grounders in the minors?
ETA: Thanks for those links, runner pat. Very good articles therein!
Elite amateur players in the U.S. will try to play in summer leagues where wooden bats are used. The Cape Cod League is one of the more famous ones. Good scouts can usually tell if a player is going to adapt well to a wooden bat.
Even the best college hitters need some time to adjust to wooden bats in the minors.
This link has some stats (HR, BA, SO).
It’s worth noting, too (although this is probably obvious) that the presence of aluminum bats affects not only hitters, but pitchers. I’ve read quite a few baseball books in which major league managers and pitching coaches lament the difficulty of getting young pitchers to throw inside.
That’s because if you pitch inside to an aluminum bat, it’s relatively easy to fight the pitch off for a base hit. But the same pitch on a wooden bat might break the bat and result in a harmless grounder. So college pitchers tend to stay away, and don’t really learn how to use the inside of the plate.
Given that cost seems to be a major factor in the use of aluminum bats in college, and major league teams often lament the time and effort required to teach young players how to hit with and pitch to the wooden bat, i’ve often wondered why MLB doesn’t offer to provide wooden bats to Division 1 college baseball teams. Sure, the expense would not be insignificant, but it would undoubtedly still be a minute percentage of MLB’s annual operating budget, and it might reap rewards in terms of helping college players make the switch to pro ball.
One thing to note is that in the old days, bats didn’t break nearly as often. Ty Cobb went through an entire season one year with the same bat. Although there are probably a number of reasons, one of them is surely that the handles were thicker. Modern players sand the handles down to the minimum possible and most bats break there. I think maple bats are more brittle than ash, which was once the only wood used. I wonder whether batters are still taught to hold the bat so that the label is up as the bat crosses the plate.
Another point is that even if you wanted your team to use wooden bats, if the other team didn’t, you would be at a disadvantage.
In a way it is similar to the DH. There is nothing funnier than watching an AL pitcher, who may not have held a bat since little leagues, trying to bat in an NL park.
Oddly enough, this is what brought the question to my mind. I was listening to an Indians game recently and the announcer was talking about this very subject in regards to the young pitcher on the mound. Until he brought it up, I had never considered it.