Sluggers Breaking Bats, Not Records

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.

Major League Baseball's newly formed Safety and Health Advisory Committee is investigating the issue. One area of inquiry will focus on whether more bats are breaking because of the trend toward thinner handles and wider barrels.

Defenders of maple argue that an outright ban on maple bats is unnecessary. Canadian batmaker Sam Holman, who helped popularize maple bats when he began making them for Barry Bonds, said he believes the problem may be inferior maple bats from manufacturers who have not completely removed the moisture from the wood.

Until the committee has its answers, Holman believes baseball needs to borrow a page from hockey's playbook: "You need to separate the field of play from the fans."

The National Hockey League extended safety netting and protective glass after a 13-year-old Ohio girl was killed by a hockey puck in 2002. That kind of protection is exactly what Rhodes said she would like to see in every stadium.

"It makes me angry that they're not doing anything, at least temporarily, even if it's the netting, to make it safer for some people," she said.

Major League Baseball has yet to enact any new safety measures. To observers like Bill Shaiken of the Los Angeles Times, the sport is playing with fire. "If somebody gets killed, God forbid, in the stands tomorrow, no one's going to want to hear about the study that's going on."