Was It a Maple Bat?

Dunno if it was a maple bat, but feel really bad for Tyler Colvin. I was fortunate to cover him years ago. Good kid and it was pretty obvious he had the potential to keep advancing his career.

Does a maple bat disintegrate any differently from an ash bat? Serious question ...

 

Yea, I've heard announcers talking about how much worse maple bats splinter.


I have seen a lot more bats break apart in smaller pieces this year, as opposed to 2-3 in past years.

 

Posted this on the baseball thread. I was watching the game when it happened. He was watching the ball and never saw the bat coming. He crossed the plate and you could tell something was wrong.

Few inches higher and it's a hell of a lot worse.

 

Yes, maple bats explode into splinters where traditional ash tends to just break. This has reached epidemic proportions over the last few years with the increased use of maple because they do supposedly give more pop out of a lighter bat. Baseball has a study going where they now collect all broken bats for study to see if it's a maple/ash difference or something else.

Maple may not be totally at fault. Much of the fault is in the fact that no player except a handful choose to swing a log nowadays. Everyone has grown up swinging composite bats from day one through college, and when they get to the pros and have to start using wooden bats, they try to shave them to replicate what they are used to, but the bats fail.

George Brett and his brother have a company that is producing a bat made from laminated pieces of hickory that's supposed to be almost fail safe but can't get them cleared because the rules call for a solid, single piece of wood. (this may not be 100 percent accurate in my relating of the story, but it's close as I understand it.)

 

How much of the bat, well, impaled him? I'm not in front of a TV right now, and the linked story makes it seem like it wasn't a splinter but a very sizeable chunk.

 

Here's a replay, until MLB's goon squad finds it.

The story says, and the replay shows, that the shard didn't stick in his skin. Seems like it just cut him deep, and in a bad spot, although it could've been a lot worse.

 

So not really impaled like the story headline suggests, but still really quite nasty. Um, ow.

 

The bat didn't stick but the wound was deep enough to potentially collapse his lung. I'd say that's a fairly serious injury.

 

Oh, no doubt it's a serious injury.

But like I said, I am not in front of TV and didn't see it until the YouTube clip, and the headline led to mental images of like ... 2/3 of a bat sticking out of someone's chest as he touched home.

 

Story says Castillo said he has only used maple.
And by using impaled implies to the bat staying lodged in his chest. I guess anyone that ever gets stabbed gets impaled.
Scary stuff no doubt.