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Up until about 10 years ago, bats in the modern era had been made of ash. Prior to the 1950's, bats were made of oak, elm, maple, hickory and ash. It was not unusual for players to swing bats as heavy as 40 ounces and more. Babe Ruth swung a 53 ounce bat at times during his career. As late as the 60's and early 70's players like Jim Rice and Willie Horton swung bats 38-40 ounces. The physics of hitting a baseball mandates that the more mass you put behind the ball, the further it will go. In the 1930s and 40's, the average Major League pitcher threw 71 mph. The present day average is 91 mph. I'm sure you've heard that pitching is all deception and hitting is all adjustment. With the advent of the cut fast ball, the splitter, the slider, etc., the longer a hitter can wait to identify the pitch, the better chance he has of not being fooled and hitting it. The longer a hitter can wait, the better he can adjust and not be deceived by the pitch thrown. I'm sorry if this is stating the obvious but it shows why ash became the wood of choice for baseball bats over the last 50 years.

As players were looking for bats light enough to allow them to wait until the last millisecond before committing to a swing, ash became the strongest wood available light enough to make bats 31-32 ounces. Reggie Smith, the former Red Sox, Cardinal, Dodger and Giant, runs a baseball school in Southern California and is a good friend of X Bats. He is very knowledgeable about baseball and has credentials beyond his 17 years in the Major Leagues to develop his ideas. He showed us a hitting video on ESPN Classic given by Ted Williams when he managed the Rangers. Ted stated at one point in his career, he liked to swing a light bat, around 34 ounces. Of the 200+ Major League players we make bats for, there are only one that uses a bat as heavy as 34 ounces. If you look at the profile of bats from the 50’s and 60’s, the throat or transition of the bat between the top of the handle and the label, was typically very thick. Handles were much thicker in the 30’s through the 70’s. Players were accustomed to swing heavier bats since they had been swinging wood from the time they picked their first bat up. A typical youth wood bat then had a weight differential of –3 or heavier. That is, a 30 inch bat would weigh 27 ounces or more. Swing this over and over and your hands and wrists become accustomed to the weight. The shape of the bat dictates the weight and the inherent strength of that bat.

What changed? The pitchers became stronger and threw harder giving the hitters less time to react and some genius invented the aluminum bat to the detriment of our national pastime. A typical weight drop for a kid swinging a 30 inch aluminum bat is –11 or –12. A 30 inch aluminum bat thus weighs 18-19 ounces whereas the 30 inch wood bat many of us swung as kids weighed 27 or 28 ounces. The aluminum bat is the most profitable piece of sporting goods equipment out there. It costs us about $50. To produce a Major League quality maple bat. We sell it for $100.00. It costs the dominant players in the aluminum bat business, less than $5.00 to produce a bat that sells for $400.00. Every boy and girl from age 5 through college swings these aluminum bats now in baseball and softball. As the players develop and start playing pro ball they must switch to wood bats. The typical aluminum bat has a –3 weight differential- 34 inches, 31 ounces or 33 inches, 30 ounces. They come in 3 lengths 32, 33 and 34 and one shape- a big 2 5/8” barrel and a thin 7/8” handle. We make over 200 different shapes or models of wood bats with weight differentials from –3 to +10. The weighting of the aluminum bat is different as well. The weight is all in the handle, whereas a wood bat’s weight is where the wood is, the barrel. If you hold a 31 ounce bat by the barrel with the weight close to your body it is going to feel a lot lighter than holding it by the handle with the weight at the end of the barrel further away from your body. It still is the same bat weighing 31 ounces but it feels lighter when the weight is closer to your body than when it is 34 inches away from your hands. Wood bats are harder to swing because of this. Aluminum bats feel lighter because the weight distribution has been manipulated.

About 10 years ago, a small company in Canada, started experimenting with making bats out of maple. Maple is a stronger, more dense and thus, heavier, wood than ash but had been too heavy to make bats in the modern era for the modern player who grew up on aluminum. The typical way to dry wood was in conventional air dried kilns. Wood could be dried down to 14-16% moisture content. At 14-16% moisture content, these bats were too heavy for use as baseball bats in the modern era. Kiln technology evolved in the last 15 years and now, with the advent of vacuum kilns, the moisture content can be reduced from 14-16% down to 5-6%. Maple is at it’s optimal strength at 10-12% moisture but the lower the moisture content, the lighter the bat that can be made (you’ll see where this is going). At 5-6% moisture content, maple could now be light enough for making bats. Because maple is a harder, more dense wood, it compresses the ball more and the ball goes 15-20% further and faster than a ball hit with ash. This is why 80% of the players in the Major Leagues use maple. Before some smaller bat companies started making maple bats, ash bats had a virtual monopoly on professional wood bats.

To make a bat, we must start with a wood square or round billets with the dimensions of approximately 3 x 3 x 37 inches. Here is where it gets interesting, ash billets will weigh between 6.5 and 7.5 pounds. Maple billets dried to 8% moisture weigh from 7 to 12 (that’s correct, 12!!! pounds). When a bat maker takes 10,000 ash billets and puts them through the automatic feeder to make ash bats, they get 10,000 ash bats differing in weight by an ounce or so (they purposely do NOT put the weight on their bats). BUT, in order to make a maple bat, you must start with a billet weighing between 6.10 pounds and 7.4 pounds. At 8% moisture, only about 50% of the billets fall into this range, the rest are too heavy and useless for making bats. We have developed a market for these heavy billets so we don't have to cut corners or over dry our wood to stay in business, other bat companies haven't figured this out or been able to do this to stay economically viable, which is why the breakage of maple bats has become an issue.

Here is where we get to the heart of the issue. In order to produce a maple bat, the billets must be cut, dried, planed, weighed and categorized according to which models they are going to be made into. Each piece must be handled individually and categorized by weight. When we make Model 24s in 34 inch 32 ounces, we must start with billets weighing a specific amount. If a player wants some bats at 31.5 ounces we must start with billets a bit lighter. Model 73s, our most popular model because of the light feel, may also be 34 inches and 32 ounces but require a lighter billet since the handle, knob and transition are thicker- more wood, more volume, same weight. In other words, each bat must have a hand picked billet weighing a specific amount or it won’t make weight for that length and shape when it’s finished.

What did this do? It created an opportunity for a small company like ours to become a player in professional baseball and the number one maple bat in baseball. How did we get there? By doing what the big guys can’t do and don’t want to do- handling each piece of wood several times- an extremely labor intensive process. Some wood bat companies only make wood bats as a showcase to sell their aluminum bats. That’s where the profit is. If players stop using their wood bats the sales of their aluminum bats will falter and that’s their bread and butter. What we have done is make manufacturing maple bats a huge pain in the butt for them now. They started making bats out of soft maple because it shared the same characteristics as ash and could be made using their automated process. Then they realized they had to do it our way and hated it. They tried to fool the players but couldn’t. The players know good wood, this is what they do.

Now to address the issue of breakage. Remember when we said maple is at it’s optimum strength at 10-12% moisture? Unfortunately, at 10-12% moisture, less than 20% of the maple billets will make weight. Now the maple bat business is not economically feasible with this low yield of usable wood. How do the maple bat company compete with this diminished yield? Most save their light maple for the pros and makes barrels under 2 7/16” for everyone else. See one of these bats and you’ll never buy another. Players are accustomed to barrels 2 9/16” to 2 5/8”. Skinny up the barrels and you can use a lot of that heavy wood. Other companies dry their maple to 5% moisture content. The result is a very brittle dry piece of wood that because of the inherent rigidity of maple, snaps like a twig.

Hence, the increased breakage of bats is due to the following: Big strong athletes using bats with big barrels and thin handles like the aluminum bats they were raised with The Inherent rigidity of maple which makes it snap when hit off the end Drying maple to 5% moisture to make production more economically viable

How do we solve these dilemmas? We have made more maple bats than ANYONE since we began in 2000. We know more about making maple bats than anyone and we don’t have all the answers but we do have many of the questions. Almost every maple bat maker out there buys their maple billets from what the wood working industry calls square manufacturers. These companies make maple squares for the furniture industry. The furniture industry wants their maple for appearance. It must be all clear, all sap, all select, all straight grained. The bat industry has the same requirements except the maple must be light and strong. If you have 4 table legs all the same shape but weighing different amounts, it doesn’t diminish the product at all. In our application, weight and strength (resistance to breakage) are KEY. How do we insure we get the right maple and the light maple (less waste makes us more economically viable)- we start with the logs. There are 5 basic grades of maple logs. The top grade is veneer grade and costs $5.30. Per board foot, the next grade down is $1.50 per board foot and the next level down is under $1.00 per board foot. We make our own billets and we select them and process them for one thing- baseball bats. Other companies are buying squares produced for the furniture industry and adapting them to the bat application. We know what logs yield the strongest lightest maple for bats and we step up and compete with the finest furniture makers for these logs (yes, it is the most expensive ones). It costs more but makes better bats with less waste. It is still a very inexact science.

Why do maple bats break? Too many people who don’t understand the process and try to take short cuts to make production economically viable by using furniture wood for bats and drying them to the point where they lose their strength and become brittle.

We hope this sheds some light on the issues that have been raised and answers some of the questions about maple bats and breakage. Most of the articles that have appeared in newspapers and print media over the last few months are extremely inaccurate and the writers are uninformed because they are getting their information from those with a vested interest in seeing maple disappear. Maple is not a dangerous wood for baseball bats any more than an airplane is a dangerous means of transportation. Fly a plane that has not been manufactured properly or an automobile that has not been manufactured with the right components and they become dangerous. Maple bats are no different.

We are still amazed how such a low tech business like turning a block of wood on a lathe has become so complex. We are having fun making a product athletes believe will help their performance. We are a small company but believe that providing players at all levels of the greatest game in the world with the best bat in baseball is our greatest reward. After all, if you don’t have fun doing what you are doing, why get up every morning? We'd like to see it become as safe as possible and that can only happen by players using bats with heavier weights and shapes that enhance balance over weight. After all the weight of the bat isn't really important. If you take a Model with a big barrel and thin handle it is going to feel very heavy. If you held the same bat by the barrel it suddenly feels light. You didn't change the weight, you changed the balance.

Last year we got our hands on an old Jackie Robinson model and made a couple up just for fun to show to players during Spring Training. It was 34 inches long and weighed 35.5 ounces. I asked 20-30 players what they thought it weighed and most guessed 31-32 ounces. When I told them 35.5 ounces, none would believe it. One player guessed right, Yogi Berra. I asked Yogi in front of 4-5 players how much the bat weighed. Yogi is no Spring chicken. He hefted the bat and said between 35 and 35.5 ounces- right on. Several Equipment Managers got their scales out to prove me right. About 15 players ordered some of that model. Because of the shape, it felt light but wasn't a light over dried piece of maple.

All sports equipment evolves over time. You don’t see tennis players using wood rackets any more, you don’t see golfers with small persimmon head drivers and you see very few players swinging ash bats at the highest level of the game. Maple bats are the new technology, they out last and out perform ash bats significantly. If they are made properly they serve their users well. It’s the ones who are making them improperly that are causing all the uproar. The shapes and weights need to be mandated to assure that the maple is heavy enough and strong enough to withstand the impact of a 200+ pound player with a 100mph swing speed hitting a ball thrown at 95+ mph.