Wood Versus Aluminum—Which Baseball Bat Is Better?

For over 30 years, New Jersey has used aluminum bats for all youth baseball and softball games, as has most of the country. The change from wood to aluminum has raised issues about the purity of the game, the risk of injuries, the effect on college scouting and the cost of replacing wood bats that break or shatter.

In the summer of 2007, the Essex County division of American Legion Baseball made the switch to wood, following a tragedy in youth baseball. Since then, proponents and opponents of wood bats have gone back and forth about the pros and cons.

While the debate about the safety differences between wood and aluminum bats has raged on, there is no question and no debate that aluminum turns a game based on pitching and defense into a slugfest.

Just picture a wood bat as a kid riding a bike and an aluminum bat as a kid riding the same bike, but this time with a twin-turbo engine attached to the back. Wood and aluminum make for two very different games. Currently, the state's baseball programs are playing the same game as most schools, colleges and universities in the country—aluminum all the way.

This spring during the Columbia baseball team's high school season, the squad belted 30 homeruns and scored 228 runs in 28 games. During the summer, where Essex County Legion baseball switches to wood, they did not hit a single homerun and scored an estimated 35-40 runs (estimate by Cougars' Legion head coach Bob Drechsel—there are no official stats for Legion ball) in 22 games, with no homeruns. While it should be noted that the players on the Legion team were not all the same players as on the high school team, with many seniors graduating, the drop from 8.1 runs per game to 1.82 has a lot to do with switching to wood.

"The power numbers are always going to be down because jam shots on aluminum can be a base hit. With wood, it's a broken bat," said CHS graduate and 2010 co-captain Stephen Tamayo.

"I prefer aluminum because it's a stats booster, but the game is more exciting with wood," said 2009 CHS grad Marcus McGriff. "Wood is more of a skills game. You find out who is really good with wood."

In Millburn, where homeruns are harder to come by with no outfield fence, the Miller boys hit about 10 homers during the regular season. During the summer, with many returnees, they hit one (according to an estimate by player Tim Swanson) and saw a significant drop in offensive production.

"Power wise, the wood is definitely a lot less," Swanson said. "Any hits to the outfield, you can see they don't have as much pop and they don't go as far."

New Jersey made the complete switch to aluminum in the spring of 1974.

"Most of us were happy at the time," said Miller softball head coach John Childs, who was a senior pitcher in South Jersey when the change was made. "If you didn't hit it squarely, the bat didn't hurt in your hands like it did with a wood bat."

While power numbers have been consistently better since the change, it's fair to note that baseball at the professional level had been trending in that direction since Babe Ruth signed with the Yankees in 1920. His 54 homeruns that season were unprecedented at the time and forever changed baseball.

Since then, 50 homerun seasons have become a regular thing, baseball has become re-popularized by the offensive explosion (most recently brought on by the steroid age), and it seems that we'd all like to see a 10-8 game as opposed to a 1-0 game.

"When you go to a major league game, you want to see homeruns, not 1-0 games." Drechsel said. "They have homerun derbies, not pitching derbies."

But while no one is complaining about the offense, there are some complaints about how the runs are being scored. Aluminum bats (which are sometimes not even completely aluminum and are mixed with different metals and alloys for lighter, more aerodynamic composite bats) have a larger "sweet spot" than wooden bats. This means that there is a larger area on a metal bat that can cause a base hit than from a wood bat, creating the cheap hits off of aluminum.

"If you look at the way the ball comes off of an aluminum bat, I don't see how you can say it's not different," said Miller head baseball coach, Daryl Palmieri. "The biggest difference to me is that [aluminum] makes getting solid contact easier."

"In general, games average 40 minutes shorter [with wood], because balls hit on the ground are outs," said Caldwell legion and high school head baseball coach Tom Lamont. "It's like you're playing 50 feet closer in the outfield with wood."

Groundouts turn into singles, singles turn into doubles, doubles turn into homeruns, .325 batting averages become .450, and 2.5 ERAs become 4.0 when switching from wood to aluminum. The game becomes less about strategy (moving runners over, bunting, sacrificing, turning double plays) and more about outscoring the opponent.

"I'm not seeing the bombs like you see with the aluminum bats," Palmieri said of summer ball. "Kids who are getting solid contact with the wood bats are hitting line drives and hits into the gaps for doubles."

While you don't need to be a scientist to see the differences, there have been several scientific studies done to quantify it. Recently, Dr. Ravindra Nuggehalli, head of the physics department at NJIT, determined that there is more force hitting the ball when a player is using aluminum.

To prove this, he took standard baseballs and froze them in liquid nitrogen at -196 degrees Fahrenheit for seven minutes. Then, he had two NJIT baseball players hit the balls off tees using both wood and aluminum bats. Dr. Nuggehalli initially hypothesized that the balls hit with the aluminum bats would explode or implode, but that was not the case.

What he did find was cracks of varying sizes on the baseballs. Balls hit with the aluminum bats lost more mass, had more cracks, longer cracks and more rings (continuous cracks). All of this proved that there was more force being generated by aluminum, thus making hits more likely.

"With the aluminum bats, there was a 15 percent increase in the change in the mass of the ball, as opposed to the wooden bats," Nuggehalli said. "In other words, the result was the ball was going faster with the aluminum bat as compared with the wood bat."

The same thing was concluded in an Illinois study conducted jointly by the NCAA and the National Federation of High Schools (NFHS) in 2007. The study determined that games with non-wood bats produce more runs, hits, at bats and last longer than games played with wood bats.

"The baseball is overall a lot better," said Jeff Goldberg, vice chairman of Essex County American Legion Baseball. "It's pure baseball, the way it's supposed to be played. Close games, low scores and good fielding." He added, "It comes off the bat, and it's not even close to the speed of an aluminum bat."

The study also determined that a wood bat breaks once every 35 at bats, providing more ammo for those opposed to banning aluminum bats.

"It's a better game with wood. The problem with wood is that there is an expense to be burdened," Lamont said "We're playing now with kids who have broken six wooden bats."

Though many players have their own bats, every high school team has some team bats that everyone can use. Theoretically, going to wood bats could cost more money than playing with aluminum bats, which never break. But with new aluminum models coming out every year, athletes growing in size and strength, the likelihood that a player uses the same bat all four years through high school (never mind in little league) is not very high. Add in the fact that aluminum bats can cost as much as $400, while wooden bats go for $30-$100, and there doesn't seem that there would be much of a cost differential.

Because of the fact that aluminum makes it easier to hit, there are regulations in place to tame the metal. Since 1974, bat companies have made tremendous improvements to the performance of aluminum bats, making them lighter and stronger at the same time.

"They're much lighter to the feel and it seems like the barrel is even bigger," said West Essex Regional High School head coach Scott Illiano of bats today compared to bats when he played (1989 h.s grad). "I affectionately call them lightning rods. How can you ever make an out with them?"

The bats began getting so out of control that the NCAA and the NFHS had to step in and mandate that the Ball Exit Speed Ratio (BESR) on all bats for organized baseball had to be identical.

A ball hit off of an aluminum bat being swung at the same speed as a wood bat must produce identical ball exit speeds, which would be slow enough to allow pitchers enough reaction time to field the ball or move out of the way. It was determined that a pitcher needs .4 seconds to react to a batted ball.

This gave those opposed to banning aluminum license to claim that there was no difference between the two aside from the sweet spots.

However, the flaw with the NCAA's bat testing procedure is that the bats are being swung by machines all at the same speed. It does not take into account that aluminum bats are much lighter than wooden bats and allow a player to generate more bat speed, which in turn makes the ball travel off of the bat faster. It also does not factor in the "trampoline effect" which causes the ball to jump off of aluminum bats more dramatically than wood.

All of that leads to more offense. But are higher scoring games necessarily a bad thing?

Baseball is notoriously a game of failure. In the MLB, a player who succeeds 30 percent of the time at the plate is considered an all-star top-tier player. Ruth, arguably the greatest hitter of all time, succeeded slightly over 34 percent of the time at the plate in his 22-year career.

Proponents of wood bats argue that eliminating aluminum bats, especially at the youth level, would cause interest to dwindle and young athletes to abandon the game. For most children, failure isn't fun and there's no questioning that they would fail more with wood than with aluminum.

"The kids who are true baseball players and the kids who truly love the game would appreciate it," Palmieri said. "They would just work harder. They would be used to hitting with wood."

Enhanced performance alone is not enough ammunition for those against non-wood bats to force a change. The most likely catalyst for a change would be if the NCAA decided to switch to wood, or if there were an epidemic of scary injuries that left them no choice.

This is the first article in a three-part series.

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