HR(or anything) records

Playing with wood bats would be more expensive. That is why they went away from wood.

And pitching against a wooden bat versus a composite bat would be totally different. You can "saw off" a batter with an inside pitch hitting with wood and with a composite/aluminum bat they can hit in opposite field gork for a single on exactly the same pitch and swing. Totally different approaches to hitting and pitching.

Wood and composite/aluminum are different games. It hurts both the pitchers and the batters going forward to a pro career with wood bats.

 

No doubt SEC teams and another dozen or so could afford it, but what do those teams do when they face a team that uses metal bats? A lot- but not all- teams cope with a few games a year on artificial turf, which is a smaller adjustment. Would a wood bat team be at a disadvantage to a weaker team with a metal bat advantage? Would the wood bat team have to switch to metal for those opponents? Would the wood bat team have to supply wood bats for the metal bat team? Would teams have to use wood bats for some opponents, metal bats for others? Some pro teams do a great job supporting rec bsb in their communities, do we expect them to shift those resources to support colleges with $100M+ athletic budgets?

Is there any goal in using wood bats beyond developing a couple hundred guys who want to be millionaires? In 50 years, metal bats have become the norm for many millions of amateur baseball players. Tradition and purity certainly aren't the justification or we'd want wool uniforms without numbers, spitballs, no night games, fire-hazard stadiums with splintered wooden bleachers and using one battered baseball for the entire game.

 

Some of the summer leagues are wooden bats and potential pro players can get experience pitching to a wood bat and hitting a wood bat. What they don't get is the experience of cold weather where a batter can get "bees" in his hands.

 

I know that the Cape Cod League swings wood, not sure about any other leagues.

 

Players selected for Cape Cod generally will have a shot at playing pro ball. The league is a great opportunity for them to show they can hit with- or pitch against- wood bats. Any elite player with MLB dreams ought to play on the Cape or in another wood bat summer league, as well as take every other opportunity to use wood bats. I'm in favor of that, but I really like the players like BT who give their all for amateur bsb, then move on to more normal adult lives. Crash Davis would say metal bats are more democratic.

 

Yeah, Alan played in the Cape and really liked it. In those 2-3 months up there I got reacquainted with the “crack of the bat” that I grew up with over the ping of aluminum bats. The townsfolk of those towns with teams really followed their teams too. (They talked funny but they did like their baseball).