Injury Sparks Wood Vs. Metal Debate

Teenage Pitcher's Injury Sparks Wood vs. Metal Debate in California

5/23/2010 10:37 PM ET

By Jeff Fletcher

Fanhouse Senior MLB Writer

OAKLAND -- Gunnar Sandberg was just an ordinary high school baseball player until one life-changing day in March, when he became a cause.

Pitching for Marin Catholic High, just north of San Francisco, Sandberg took a line drive off his head. He spent much of the next month in a coma, unaware that his injuries had spawned a movement that went all the way to the California statehouse.

Assembly Bill 7, which will be considered this week by the state senate, would impose a two-year moratorium on the use of metal bats in high school baseball in California.

"Having been around baseball for a while and talking to kids who play, it sure seems those metal bats are a lot more powerful than the wood bats," said Gunnar's father Bjorn Sandberg. "If you have to err on the side of safety, why not? If we can keep anyone from going through what we've gone through as a family and to keep any kid from having to suffer the way Gunnar has, it would be fantastic."

Gunnar is on the road to recovery. He was invited to the A's-Giants game on Sunday to throw out the first pitch. He was wearing a helmet because he is still missing a piece of his skull, which was removed to allow for the swelling of his brain. He looks pale and somewhat wobbly as he walks. He has some short-term memory issues. For the most part, though, the 16-year-old boy and his family are thrilled with his recovery. He's expecting to return to school in the fall for his senior year, and to play baseball again next spring.

Hopefully facing only wooden bats.

"Just for safety," Gunnar said, "I think it's worth it to change to wood bats."

Sandberg's team and the entire league voluntarily switched to wood bats after the accident. Community members were selling "Got Wood?" T-shirts, with the proceeds going to help pay Sandberg's medical bills. California assemblyman Jared Huffman, who represents Marin County, authored the bill to ban the metal bats just weeks after the March 11 accident.

Of course, it's not that simple.

Mike May, spokesman for the Sporting Goods Manufacturers Association, said he's been devoting almost all of his time to defending the metal bat since Sandberg's accident. May has been plying lawmakers and members of the media with one study after another to show that accidents like Sandberg's are no more likely with metal bats than with wooden ones.

"We just want the decision in California to be made on facts and data, not emotions," May told FanHouse.

The metal bats of today are safer than those of a few years ago, May said, because of standards in place since 2003 to regulate the Ball Exit Speed Ratio (BESR) off metal bats.

"Many people don't realize that the baseball bat of 1980 can't be used today," May said. "People think bats have gotten more juiced up, and frankly it's the opposite."

May also said that the NCAA is adopting a standard to further weaken metal bats in 2011, with the National Federation of State High School Associations adopting it in 2012.

The idea of the standard is to have the metal bats perform more like wood bats.

A study conducted by Daniel A. Russell of Michigan's Kettering University in 2007 concluded that the differences between the performance of metal and wood bats was negligible. Russell determined that the maximum velocity of the baseball off a metal bat was about 5 mph faster than off a wood bat, which results in about four hundredths of a second less reaction time for a pitcher. That's "one-fifth of the time required to blink an eye," Russell wrote.

While it's true that perfect sweet-spot contact off a wood bat is essentially just as dangerous as that off a metal bat, it happens less frequently with wood because the sweet spot is smaller.

"A greater percentage of hits from a metal bat will have close to the maximum batted-ball speed, compared to a wood bat," Russell wrote.

Whether that makes metal bats more "dangerous" is a matter of semantics.

Zac Byers isn't sure. He's the player who hit the ball that struck Sandberg. A center fielder at De La Salle High in nearby Concord, Byers has become friends with Sandberg, and he joined him for his tour of the Coliseum on Sunday. Byers said he continued to use his metal bat -- albeit a different one -- for the rest of the season.

"I'm kind of undecided," he said. "I don't know. I'd like to know more about what the actual speed difference would be. I think it could actually happen with any type of bat."

One of the A's players Sandberg met was Brad Ziegler, who had been through a similar life-threatening accident while in the minors. Ziegler was pitching at Single-A in 2004, his skull was fractured by a line drive. He ended up in the intensive care unit for six days.

While Ziegler obviously knows that wood bats can also cause serious injuries, he was skeptical about the industry defense of metal bats.

"They can say whatever they want, there is no way a ball off wood is the same as a ball off aluminum," Ziegler said.

Bjorn Sandberg has not bee paying much attention to what's going on in the state assembly. He hasn't been reading the statistics from the bat manufacturers. He has been too busy tending to his son, suffering through a three-week induced coma that was supposed to last just one week. During the recovery, Sandberg has received support from strangers across the country.

"There are a lot of people who have reached out and some of them have really tragic endings," he said. "I get emails from other people who said 'My son had a similar thing and he didn't make it. He died on the fourth day.' There are so many tragic stories."

That's why he's hoping to see the end of the metal bat.

"We don't want them to do it for Gunnar," he said. "That horse is out of the barn. Let's keep it from happening again. Every sport has a certain amount of risk, but if you can lessen the chances, then why not?"

That's all great until some kid gets impaled with a piece of a broken wood bat. Then what will they do? Ban baseball?

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