For the first century of baseball's existence, if you wanted to play, you played with a wooden bat. The first aluminum bats didn't arrive until the 1970s--but once they did, they quickly took over the sport at all but the highest levels. Within 30 years, aluminum accounted for nearly 95 percent of all bats sold in the United States.
Significance
Major League Baseball still uses wood bats exclusively, as do the minor leagues. In every other level of baseball--youth, high school and college--aluminum bats are the standard. Aluminum is also the standard in softball, but in that sport, the alternative isn't wood, it's composite bats made with materials such as carbon and fiberglass.
Materials
Wood is an organic product; it's naturally going to have hard and soft spots, weak points and strong points. To make a wood bat, you can try to select a good piece of a hardy wood species--ash or maple--but you can't manipulate the grain of the wood or blend the wood with other substances to enhance its characteristics. Aluminum bats, however, start out as molten metal; you can add other elements--such as zinc, magnesium, scandium, even titanium--to add strength, reduce weight or produce a "trampoline effect" that gives the ball more bounce off the bat. Further, you can ensure that the alloy is uniform--that all the elements are evenly distributed throughout the bat.
Effects
While the organic nature of wood leaves it vulnerable to cracking, splitting and shattering, an aluminum bat is nearly indestructible. It might become dented or deformed from heavy use over a long period, but instances of aluminum bats cracking or breaking are rare. Aluminum bats tend to cost more than wood, but their considerably longer life span makes up for that difference. Hollow aluminum bats can also be made lighter than wood bats. The power in a swing comes from the speed of the bat, not its weight, so the lighter the bat, the better.
Benefits
When a wooden bat breaks, it's usually because the pitch hit it on the handle, the thinnest and weakest part of the bat. On aluminum bats, however, the handle is actually the strongest part of the bat because the metal wall is thicker there. This allows you to drive a pitch off the handle in a way that simply wouldn't be possible with a wood bat. Aluminum bats have an advantage when the ball hits the barrel, too. Every bat has a "sweet spot," the area of the barrel that produces the greatest ball speed with the least vibration. An aluminum bat, with its uniform construction, has a sweet spot roughly twice the size of a wood bat's. The larger sweet spot translates into more of the booming line drives that every slugger strives to hit.
Considerations
The ability of aluminum bats to produce faster, more powerful hits creates concerns over player safety--particularly for the pitchers stationed right in front of the batter. Because of this, the governing bodies of amateur baseball in the United States require that aluminum bats be roughly comparable to wood when it comes to the speed of the ball off the bat. This requirement reduces some of the competitive advantages of aluminum bats, but it doesn't eliminate them. Even if a hard-hit ball comes off a metal bat at the same speed as a wood bat, the way an aluminum bat is built ensures that there will be more of those hard-hit balls in the first place.
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