FREE ESSAY ON TOOLS OF THE TRADE

TOOLS OF THE TRADE

Tool of the Trade
In any game, the equipment players use determines the way the game unfolds. Try to
imagine a soccer game played with an American football! Or try playing tennis with the
wooden racquets of thirty years ago. Change the equipment, and you discover a very
different game. As part of my look at baseball, I decided to examine the tool of the
baseball trade: Bats.
Perhaps the most crucial and visible tool in baseball is the bat. A bat is the offensive
weapon, the tool with which runs are scored. To understand the history and science of
bats, I read a magazine published by Louisville Slugger, in Louisville, Kentucky home of
the Hillerich & Bradsby Company, Inc. (also known as H&B), the manufacturers of perhaps
America's most famous bat, the Louisville Slugger. Through the reading I learned how the
modern bat came to be, and what it might become.
In 1884, John Andrew Bud Hillerich played hooky from his father's woodworking shop and
went to a baseball game. There he watched a star player, Pete The Old Gladiator Browning,
struggling in a batting slump. After the game, Hillerich invited Browning back to the
shop, where they picked out a piece of white ash, and Hillerich began making a bat. They
worked late into the night, with Browning giving advice and taking practice swings from
time to time. What happened next is legend. 
The next day, Browning went three-for-three, and soon the new bat was in demand across
the league. H&B flourished from there. First called the Falls City Slugger, the new bat
was called the Louisville Slugger by 1894. Though Hillerich's father thought bats were an
insignificant item, and preferred to continue making more dependable items like bedposts
and bowling pins, bats became a rapidly growing part of the family business.
Just as it was back then, the classic Louisville Slugger bat used by today's professional
players is made from white ash. The wood is specially selected from forests in
Pennsylvania and New York. The trees they use must be at least fifty years old before
they are harvested. After 
harvest, the wood is dried for six to eight months to a precise moisture level. The best
quality wood 
is selected for pro bats; the other 90 percent is used for consumer market bats. White
ash is used for its combination of hardness, strength, weight, feel, and durability. 
In past years, H&B have made some bats out of hickory. But hickory timber is much heavier
than ash, and players today want light bats because they've discovered that they can hit
the ball farther by swinging the bat fast. So they can't make the bats out of hickory.
Though Babe Ruth, one of the all-time great home-run hitters, used a 42 or a 44 ounce
bat, players today use bats that weigh around 32 ounces. Even sluggers like Mark McGwire
and Ken Griffey, Jr. only use 33 ounce bats because they want to generate great bat
speed.
How do you make a wooden bat you ask. Here's how. The wood is milled into round, 37 inch
blanks, or billets, which are shipped to the H&B factory in Louisville. There they are
turned on a tracer lathe, using a metal template that guides the lathe's blades. These
templates are set up to the specifications of each pro player. 
Then the bats are fire-branded with the Louisville Slugger mark. This mark is put on the
flat of the wood's grain, where the bat is weakest. Players learn to swing with the label
facing either up or down, so that they can strike the ball with the edge grain, where the
bat is strongest. Hitting on the flat grain will more often than not result in a broken
bat. 
Finally, the bats are dipped into one of several possible water-based finishes or
varnishes, which gives bats their final color and protective coat. Each player selects
the finish they desire, while a few players, such as former Kansas City Royals star
George Brett, chose to leave their bats unfinished. 
Players today may go through as many as six or seven dozen bats in a season. (In early
years, players used only use ten or twelve bats.) In fact, one player, Joe Sewell, used
the same bat for fourteen years. Joe attributes the increased breakage of bats to the
thin-handled, large-barreled design of modern bats, and to the use of ash instead of
hickory. A pitch that jams you inside will almost always saw off a modern bat, while an
aluminum or old-fashioned hickory bat might produce a base hit. 
Though the manufacturing process for bats has stayed largely the same, the design of the
pro wood bat has changed a great deal since 1884. The early bats had very little taper,
resulting in a
bat with a very thick handle and a relatively small barrel. The early bats almost look
like someone 
just took an ax handle and used it for a bat. Modern players want a thin handle and a
large barrel, to concentrate the weight of the bat in the hitting area. By major league
regulations, bats must be round with a barrel of no more than 2 3/4 inches. They can be
up to 42 inches in length; there is no regulation about the bat's weight. 
One of the few innovations to the design of the wooden bat is cutting a cup out of the
end of a bat. Developed by a pro player named Jose Cardinal in 1972, this cup can't be
more than 2 inches in width, and 1 inch deep. The cupped bat allows the bat maker to use
a heavier, denser, 
stronger timber, while still maintaining the desirable bat weight. Recently, Ted Williams
visited the Louisville Slugger Company and he said that if he was playing today, all of
his bats would be cupped. About half the pro bats made by H&B today are cupped bats.
Throughout the history of baseball, players in search of an edge have doctored, or
altered, bats in many unusual ways. The main strategy has been corking the bat. Players
cut the end of the bat off, drill a hole down into the barrel of the bat, and fill the
hole with cork, then glue the end back on. This is an attempt to lighten the bat, and
give it more spring or bounce. But really this does nothing advantageous to the bat. In
fact, the bat gets weaker, because they've drilled out the heart of it. You may remember
the time when [pro player] Graig Nettles put a bunch of rubber superballs inside his bat,
and the bat broke, and all the balls spilled out. Nettles attributes the persistence of
corking more to head games between the players than to any advantage a corked bat might
have. 
Players have also been known to rub their bats with ham bones or glass bottles, a process
called boning, in an attempt to harden the bat. However, this practice doesn't seem to
produce any benefit beyond the psychological either. In early days, some hitters would
illegally hammer nails into their bats so that the ball would strike iron. Even if the
bat could be made harder, it would only diminish hitting. Solid wood bats give very
little in the impact area, and thus they store very
little energy. What little they do store, they give back [to the ball] very efficiently.
On the other hand, the ball distorts a lot under impact, and is relatively inefficient in
giving the energy back. So a harder bat just results in more deformation of the ball, and
a lesser hit. The question that come to us next was, but what about a metal bat?
The most stunning change in baseball bats in the past thirty years started in the 1970s,
when bats made from tubes of aluminum began to appear. These tubes are machined to vary
the wall 
thickness and the diameter, and produce bats that are light, strong, and hollow, as
opposed to the solid wood. At first, the aluminum bat was just a metal copy of a wooden
bat. They were just more
durable, so they were cheaper to use. But manufacturers and players soon discovered that
there were other differences as well. Aluminum bats are quite different than wooden ones.
They're much lighter, more than five ounces. The barrels are bigger, and because they are
lighter they can be swung faster than a wooden bat. In addition, the hardness and
resilience of aluminum can result in much greater speeds when the ball comes off the bat.
Major League Baseball has required that its 
players use wooden bats, but the aluminum bat has come to dominate the lower levels of
baseball, from Little League to American Legion to the college game. The most significant
difference between wooden and aluminum bats is that with an aluminum bat, a phenomenon
occurs called the 'trampoline effect.' The walls of the bat are thin enough that they
deform, or flex when the ball hits the bat. Some of the energy (of the collision) is
transferred into the bat instead of the ball. That energy is almost totally elastic; it
is given back, or bounces back, almost 100 percent. The energy absorbed when the ball is
deformed is almost 75 percent lost to heat, and thus wasted as far as propelling the
ball. Because of this trampoline effect, you can hit the ball somewhat faster, and
somewhat farther. In fact, when the NCAA approved the use of aluminum bats in 1974, H&B
started comparing statistics and found that the team batting averages went up about
twenty points, and the home-run production about doubled. The primary reason that wooden
bats are required in the pros is due to this performance difference. The pro leagues want
to protect their historical records, and they want the performance of the game to be the
result of human ability, rather than the technology of the bats.
Ever-increasing performance of metal bats has begun to affect the game at the college
level and below. Aluminum bat makers have been exploring stronger and lighter metal
alloys. The results include ever-lighter bats with thinner walls, and consequently higher
bat speeds and even greater trampoline effects. A ball hit by these bats travels farther
and faster. In addition, H&B has already made a bat called the AirAttack in which a
polyurethane bladder is inserted into the center hollow, then filled with pressurized
nitrogen gas. The gas pressure in the bladder supports bat walls, pushing them out after
they are deformed under impact. This support allows a much thinner wall and a greater
trampoline effect. H&B has a softball bat called the Inertia, in which the interior of
the
bat contains a rolled-up steel spring that does the same thing. Batting averages and
home-run 
production have gone up consistently at the college level as these advances have
appeared. 
Titanium was used briefly, but it was quickly prohibited because that metal's combination
of 
high strength, light weight, and elasticity was clearly going to result in shattering all
hitting records in all phases of the game. You could actually grab the barrel of the bat
in your hands and squeeze, and you could feel the bat give. The trampoline effect was
enormous, and though titanium was banned, Louisville Slugger learned a lot about how to
make aluminum bats achieve the same effect.
Recently, a heated debate has broken out over the widespread use of aluminum bats in 
college leagues. Many in baseball fear that modern technology is creating a superbat,
which will irrevocably alter the game and endanger players. Indeed, the rules committees
are diligently looking at the performance of bats, and they have already put some limits
on performance; they may well add more. They are not only concerned about the integrity
of the game, the balance between offense and defense, but they are also concerned about
safety. The NCAA rules committee has decreed that many modern metal bats are dangerous to
players and disruptive to the game. The high speed of the ball coming off the these metal
bats has put pitchers in danger, as a line drive hit at them may be traveling too fast
for them to get out of the way. And the energy of a hit ball increases as the square of
the velocity, so a fast hit can do more damage. As a result, the NCAA has ordered
recently that bat manufacturers alter their designs to make bats heavier, with a smaller
barrel. And baseball organizations from college to Little League are considering a return
to a wooden bats only policy, though the expense of wooden bats may make such a move
unfeasible.