What can go wrong with single-piece maple bats?
Maple is a heavier, denser wood than ash, so if you want to make a bat out of maple that is the same weight and exactly the same shape as ash, you have to do something to reduce its weight. The only variable to manipulate is moisture content. I suspect that many of these maple bats that were provided to Major League Baseball were dried out too much. Anybody who’s been camping knows that a dry piece of wood is much more brittle than a moist piece. The second issue with maple is it has a very fine grain, and when it breaks it creates razor-sharp edges. If you combine the increased brittle nature of dried maple and the fact that when it catastrophically fails you get very dangerous edges, then you wind up with the conditions that you saw last year in the Major Leagues. Q: Do you consider metal bats safe? A: The conventional wisdom is that they’re dangerous because balls rebound off them faster. I think the more important problem is that balls don’t rebound off them consistently. If you hi
