The Smokin' Sports Gun

Yes I'm back peoplez, and hopefully to stay for a while. I hope I haven't forgotten how to write (as if). We'll anyway the Mets are rolling, we just got a new commissioner of the NFL (which scares me to death) but what I am going to talk about is  a universal sports issue, and a universal sports problem is you ask me.

Unless you've be watching ESPN commercials you probably don't know though, if you have an internal clock it figures it's due, the Little League World Series will be starting really soon. And unless you're Kalen Pimentel and getting all of your outs by K's, every at-bat you're pretty much going to here the sound "Ping!" That got me thinking last night, though I've said it was a pointless idea before I really thought about it, deep into it.  I would love to talk to the person who invented metal bats. Ask him what his motivation was because the whole idea makes no logical or humane sense.

Let's start by going back to history of baseball, the idea of a game such as baseball originated in Africa with Africans playing a similar game with sticks. You can even go back just 50's years ago when boys in New York City were commonly playing stick ball. And I can guarantee you when Abner Doubleday wrote the the rules for the game of baseball the idea of hitting the ball with anything but lumber was not even an idea it was so far off the radar screen. Baseball is the game where history is more important than any other game, baseball history is most magnified and it makes no historical to use metal bats before anything.

Now lets get to right now, when a kid is playing in little league they're ultimate goal is to be in the MLB. Now yes usually that dream fades when it becomes unrealistic, or if they're not good enough. That doesn't change the fact that most players experience with baseball when they still have those MLB dreams is with metal bats in Little League. Because the fact is in the MLB or any level of professional baseball operated by the MLB there is no metal bats. So with kids wanting to get there why even bother starting them out like that. Because most of those fade, but when you start getting scouted in high school and college it only makes it worse.

When a professional scout is coming to watch a high school player or going to NCAA game the hope is that the players they're scouting might one day be good enough to play and be effective where it counts which is in the MLB. Using metal at those levels only makes it harder for scouts to project the players ahead, and only makes it harder for a player to find himself because they'd be playing an entirely different game in pro baseball. And it also makes it a difficult adjustment in the minors because truth be told most high school players right now have never held a wooden bat. So maybe they never become anything, despite all the talent in the world,  because metal is all they know. So many different unnecessary rings get thrown into the whole process because of them.

The best way to describe it is you don't see how far someone throws a tennis ball, to see how much of a gun an outfielder would have playing baseball. And that's what you're essentially doing with scouting players, the only difference is in baseball the only way to win games is to score runs and you do that by hitting, so the single most important thing you do in a baseball game is the one most faultily decided? And unfortunately right now in American Sports the answer is yes.

What makes this problem worse is that this is not one of these problems where one person or even a group of people can make a huge difference. The only rules regarding bats in most high school, college and AAU leagues is what kind of  metal bats can be used. And even if they were to decided to allow wooden bats the people who use them wouldn't be able to keep up with the competition despite any talent they may possess. That's the only reason I use metal bats is because I'd fall behind the rest of the competition if I didn't. It's actually detrimental as far as going to the pro level is concerned because I can't use one any further than college, and there's a hard adjustment.

He can't use that kind of stick (notice the term stick = WOOD) any further, what's the point?

All that being said we haven't even gotten to the problem that most people (not including myself) who are against metal bats have with them. Now I don't think we have to get into Newton's 3rd Law of Motion "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" because we all know if a 80-90mph pitch going to batter it gets hit back to the pitcher even harder when hit right back to him. And the way a ball can bounce off a metal bat especially wth human force exerted on it becomes very dangerous. The velocity by which a metal bat can hit a ball back to a pitcher compared to wooden bat is incomparable, no comparison. 

Many promising pitchers careers have been ended extremely early do to the these shiny devils, even infielders. No lie, I've even seen a ball hit so hard of a metal bat that's it's gone THREW A LEATHER GLOVE into a fielders face and he had to go to the emergency room. It's obviously to much for person to play a game with and if they're going to try to solve it by taking away the force a ball can come off them, you might as well get rid of them all together because again, there's no point. 

Now, the NCAA, whatever the National high school sports authority is, AAU, Little League, and anyone else running baseball should have rules against them and then people will just stop buying them. If not we can take it to congress and get them outlawed, which I think should happen anyway. And I don't want to here they have more important things to do. Because if they can take the time in the midst of the war in Iraq along with the other international chaos to stick their noses where they don't belong in the MLB they can surely do something that physically affects a much larger group of people in our country.

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