Aluminum bats: good for college baseball? — Despising the sound of the ding

See also: COUNTERPOINT – GREAT FOR PLAYERS AND THE GAME

Ping!

Sorry, I hope you can… See also: COUNTERPOINT – GREAT FOR PLAYERS AND THE GAME

Ping!

Sorry, I hope you can hear me. I’m down by my local college’s batting cage and they’re (ping!) taking batting practice with their aluminum bats. I don’t know why they insist on using them. As far as I can tell, they only take away from the college game.

First of all, they give an advantage to the hitter. What can a pitcher do? He has a fastball, a curve, maybe a slider or sinker or even a splitter if he’s tricky. What good does that do him against these bats? He’s (ping!) not allowed to use sandpaper or pine tar and he’s not allowed to spit on the ball to enhance his performance, but hitters can use these?

Don’t get me wrong. If this were just a stick of aluminum with a rubber grip, I might not have a problem. But we’re talking about a 33-inch, 30-ounce piece of space-age technology. If you look hard enough, I’m pretty sure you can find every element of the periodic table (ping!) in these new bats. A high school teammate of mine had a bat with scandium in it. Don’t they make stadium lights out of that stuff?

Meanwhile, NASA is struggling to pay for the Hubble Telescope. They’re exactly the kind of people for these bats! All they need to do is pick up a contract from Easton and develop a new alloy, and they’ll be right back on track. The price (ping!) of these bats is often somewhere around the GNP of Costa Rica. So a few new metals and we’re putting men on Pluto.

These bats also contribute to the scores of college playoff games being well above their professional counterparts. Take, for example, the 1998 College World Series Title game.

USC defeated Arizona State by a score of 21-14. Seriously. (ping!) I only saw the beginning of the game, so I don’t know what happened — did the Hail Mary fall incomplete? But if this is what is happening in the championship game (ping!), a game that theoretically should feature two championship-caliber pitching staffs, maybe the rules committee needs to rethink what they’re letting hitters get away with.

The bottom line is that the players don’t even need these bats. Miami (Fla.) beat the Florida Marlins in spring training this year, using (ping!) wooden bats. While this wasn’t a game against the starting nine for the regular season, the Hurricanes still proved for all of the NCAA that college teams can compete using wood.

And by the way — did I mention that there’s nothing worse for the human ear than that shrill, piercing, make-a-dead-Babe-Ruth-sit-up-and-wonder-what-the-heck-that-sound-was ping! these bats make? (Ping!)