Almost from the time they were introduced in the 1970s, aluminum bats have been surrounded by safety questions. Players have been killed and badly injured by balls hit off aluminum bats---but the same has happened with wood bats, too. A look at aluminum bats and injuries reveals that the issue is, to quote an analysis by Popular Mechanics magazine, "muddled with a lack of solid empirical data."
History
Aluminum bats began spreading through baseball in the 1970s after bat manufacturer Worth introduced the first one-piece aluminum bat. At first they were mostly a cost-saving measure: Though aluminum bats are more expensive than wood---as much as 10 times as expensive---they last far longer. As bat technology developed, however, players recognized that the aluminum bats were lighter, which meant greater bat speed and more power. Aluminum bats also had a larger and more consistent "sweet spot," the area of a bat that transfers the greatest velocity to the ball at contact. These same advantages, however, have fueled decades of debate over safety.
Significance
While Major League Baseball and its affiliated minor leagues all use wooden bats, the vast majority of amateur teams use aluminum. Little League approved metal bats in 1971, the NCAA in 1974. Aluminum is now standard for youth, high-school and college baseball.
Effects
The question of aluminum bats and injuries comes down to speed---specifically, the speed of the ball as it leaves the bat. Critics of the use of metal bats say that aluminum bats' light weight, resilient material and engineered design give batted balls greater velocity. That increased speed, they say, gives players in the field, particularly pitchers, less time to react to line drives. Tony Kalant, the father of an Illinois boy who suffered brain damage when a line drive off an aluminum bat struck him in the head in 2005, told the New York Times, "The ball was hit so hard and came so fast, he didn't have a chance." Other players have been killed, including 18-year-old Brandon Patch of Montana, whose parents won a lawsuit against the maker of Louisville Slugger bats in 2010.
Data
Despite anecdotal evidence of grave injuries caused by metal bats, Richard Greenwald, the founder of the National Institute of Sports Science and Safety, told Popular Mechanics in 2010 that "there's no data that I'm aware of" that says aluminum bats produce more injuries or more severe injuries. A review by the Consumer Products Safety Commission in 2002 came to a similar conclusion. In fact, a study by the National Center of Sport Injury Research found that among players who used aluminum bats during their college seasons but wood bats in summer leagues, incidence of injury was slightly higher with wood bats. However, no large-scale study of injuries has been performed. Most of the research on the issue focuses instead on the physics: Does the ball actually come off an aluminum bat faster?
Considerations
Bat producers strongly deny that aluminum bats pose a greater danger. They point to industry regulations that require that aluminum bats perform similar to wooden bats in terms of "Bat Exit Speed Ratio," a measure of how fast the ball comes off the bat relative to the speed of the pitch and the speed of the swing. The Don't Take My Bat Away Coalition, a group backed by sporting goods manufacturers, says no bat can be approved for use unless it passes this "BESR" test.
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