Sluggers Breaking Bats, Not Records
The major leagues have seen a shocking number of shattered bats this year.
Oct. 5, 2008— -- Records, as the saying goes, are made to be broken. But in this baseball season, what's being broken isn't a cause for celebration. It's a cause for concern.
Major league baseball has recently seen an alarming increase in the number of bats breaking upon impact. Pieces from those bats have struck and injured players, a coach, an umpire and two fans.
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Baseball veteran and Los Angeles Dodgers manager Joe Torre said he has never seen anything like it.
"From my playing experience, I remember we used to splinter bats and bats used to break," Torre said. "But they never just come apart like they do now."
Former player and Dodger coach Don Mattingly sees bats shatter with tremendous force.
"You think about somebody catching one in the neck, basically," he said. "Because a lot of times you see them coming down, you see them land in the middle of the field like spears almost."
At a Dodgers game in Los Angeles on April 25, Susan Rhodes was sitting in the stands just 50 feet away from home plate when her jaw was broken by what was left of a bat that broke when Colorado Rockies first baseman Todd Helton connected with a pitch. She now has four screws and a titanium plate in her jaw.
"I see people who are sitting so close with their children," she said. "I don't think they have any idea how dangerous this really is."
Players breaking their bats has always been a part of the game. For years, most bats were made of ash. But 10 years ago, Major League Baseball approved the use of bats made from maple, made popular by the record-breaking Barry Bonds. And while ash bats can crack, maple bats tend to snap and shatter.
Rhodes wasn't this season's first victim of a broken maple wood bat. Ten days earlier, Pittsburgh Pirates coach Don Long was struck in the dugout by a fragment from a splintered maple bat that left him with a gash below his eye.
She also wasn't the last: On June 24, home plate umpire Brian O'Nora was hit in the head and bloodied by a shattered maple bat during a game in Kansas City, Mo.
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