Wooden Versus Aluminum Baseball Bats
1).
Aluminum bats can be made much lighter to be swung faster. The barrels of the bats can be made bigger for a much larger "sweet spot." The "sweet spot" can be up to 470 percent larger on an aluminum bat than that of a wooden bat. "The oversize aluminum bat diminishes talent, the visual body adjustment ability is not developed. It is much like aiming an arrow at a three-foot bull's eye instead of the correct one-inch. Soon one cannot find the correct one-inch sweet spot" (Research 12). This can result in an achievable hit distance by an estimated one hundred to one hundred and sixty feet further than a wooden bat. The exact center of the bull's eye is compared to the exact sweet spot on the bat. It is the point where one can reach maximum efficiency in a bat (Robinson).
One effect that an aluminum bat has is called the trampoline effect. As a result of the aluminum bat being hollow, the bat also has an elastic property. So, at contact with the ball, the bat absorbs the energy of the ball. In addition to the bat springing back, the bat also transfers the energy of the ball and combines the energy of the bat to create the trampoline effect. A wooden bat is totally inelastic and will not spring back (Research 4). The aluminum bat provides a handicap for the hitter.
There is vast disparity in the statistics of a player who uses an aluminum bat and one who uses a wooden bat. A player who uses a wooden bat characteristically has a batting average between one and two hundred points less than a player who uses an aluminum bat. The aluminum bat also hits between sixty to seventy percent more home runs than a wooden bat.
There are many types of wooden bats that are used. The ash bat has been the most widely used wooden bat in the history of baseball. For many reasons, ash wood is very abundant and therefore it is cheap. The downside to ash is that it is not very durable. An ash bat may last between twenty to seventy hits of a ball. A current superstar in major league baseball, Barry Bonds, recently made maple wood very popular by smashing seventy-two home runs to break the single season home run record of seventy. Many people switched to maple wood after seeing Bonds achieve this record with his maple wooden bat. The maple bat is much more dense than an ash bat. Maple wooden is thirty-five to forty-five percent more durable than the ash bat (Robinson). Maple is a more dense wooden than ash. However, the density of the wood does not make a difference in the exit velocity (Robinson). Consequently, the type of wood used to make a bat does not affect the strength of the bat.
One innovation that Baum Bat Company has been developing is a composite bat. The composite bat has a foamed plastic core with [next page]