Mar 13 2007 09:44 AM
Pros weighing in on amateur issues.
Council Moves Toward Ban on Metal High School Bats
By SEWELL CHAN
Published: March 13, 2007
New York City would become one of the first cities in the country to prohibit the use of metal bats in high school baseball games, under a bill that a City Council committee approved yesterday and that the full Council is considered all but certain to pass tomorrow.
The issue has sharply divided youth baseball leagues, coaches, players and fans. Industry groups have hired lobbying and public relations firms to oppose the bill, while parents of players severely injured by balls hit off metal bats have given tearful testimony in support of it.
Even players from Major League Baseball, which uses only wood bats, have taken positions: Mike Mussina, a Yankees pitcher, is against the ban; John Franco, a former Mets pitcher, is for it.
The Council’s Youth Services Committee approved the bill on a 4-to-0 vote. The bill has 32 sponsors and the support of the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn. They would need 34 votes, two-thirds of the 51 members on the Council, to override a veto by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.
“The mayor has some skepticism both about whether this bill fixes the problem it says it does and whether this is something the government should be doing,” a mayoral spokesman, Stu Loeser, said yesterday. “He has made no decision about a veto.”
According to the Council, it would cost the city’s public high schools $253,500 to replace 5,070 metal or metal-composite bats used by 169 baseball teams with wood bats, and $67,600 a year thereafter to replace broken wood bats. The bill’s sponsors said they would ask donors to defray the costs for private and parochial schools.
The bill’s leading proponent, Councilman James S. Oddo, said that youth baseball regulatory bodies had failed to respond to highly publicized episodes in which children were critically injured by balls hit with metal bats.
“Where the overseeing bodies have failed to live up to their responsibility to protect these kids, it falls into our laps,” Mr. Oddo, Republican of Staten Island, said at a committee hearing yesterday before the vote.
Critics of metal bats say that a batted ball flies faster off a metal bat than off a wood one. As a result, they say, the ball may strike a young pitcher in the head before he has a chance to protect himself.
But David A. Ettinger, a Detroit lawyer for Easton Sports, a leading bat maker based in Van Nuys, Calif., said there were no reliable studies to establish greater risk to players from metal bats. “It is fundamentally illogical and has no scientific support,” he said of the bill.
The New York City bill would require that only wood bats be used in competitive high school baseball games, effective Sept. 1. An earlier version of the bill, introduced in 2001, would have covered Little League and independent leagues as well, but Mr. Oddo narrowed the proposal to gain broader support within the Council.
In New Jersey, a State Assembly committee voted in October to approve a broader bill that would ban metal and metal-composite bats from league and school baseball games played by children 17 and younger. The full Assembly and the Senate have not yet voted on it.
The North Dakota High School Activities Association has banned nonwood bats, starting this spring.
But New York appears likely to be among the first cities to enact legislation banning nonwood bats.
The City Council heard testimony in October from Debbie Patch of Miles City, Mont., whose 18-year-old son, Brandon, was killed by a ball in a high school game on July 25, 2003. Yesterday, the Council heard from Joseph Domalewski of Wayne, N.J., whose 12-year-old son, Steven, was critically injured in a game on June 6, 2006. Brandon was hit in the head, and Steven in the chest, with balls hit by metal bats.
Two high school baseball coaches testified in favor of the ban. Jack Curran, a veteran coach at Archbishop Molloy High School in Queens, said he believed that metal bats endanger pitchers. “We may need a screen in front of pitchers during games, if we continue using these bats,” he said.
Philip Romero, baseball coach at Christopher Columbus High School in the Bronx, said the “sweet spot” — the area on the bat where the batter makes the best contact with the ball — is larger on aluminum bats than on wood ones. “In my view, aluminum bats are no better than steroids for the game of baseball,” he said.
But several coaches, including Steve Mandl of George Washington High School in Manhattan, testified that the ban was unjustified. The New York Catholic High Schools Athletic Association also opposes the ban.
Little League Baseball and Softball and another league, Protect Our Nation’s Youth, oppose the ban. USA Baseball, the governing body for amateur baseball, offered to finance a one-year independent study of the frequency and severity of injuries associated with metal and wood bats, with input from the Council, but Mr. Oddo rejected the idea.
Metal bats were introduced in the early 1970s as a cost-saving alternative to wood bats, and by the early 1980s, a consensus had emerged among players and coaches that metal bats outperform wood ones. The National Collegiate Athletic Association first adopted guidelines for limiting bat performance in 1998.
Researchers from Brown University found in 2001 that baseballs hit with a metal bat traveled faster than those hit with a wood bat, but could not conclusively identify the factors responsible for the difference in performance. Since then, the N.C.A.A. and the National Federation of State High School Associations have adopted rules requiring that metal bats perform no better than the best wood bats.
On Sunday, Richard M. Greenwald, one of the Brown researchers, wrote that he knew of no scientific data to support the notion “that the use of nonwood bats poses an unacceptable risk to children, particularly high school competitive players,” according to an e-mail message released by Easton Sports.
Bat makers have hired Suri Kasirer and Stanley K. Schlein, prominent city lobbyists, and Knickerbocker SKD, a media consulting firm. Mr. Ettinger, the lawyer for Easton Sports, said yesterday that the ban, if enacted, could face a strong legal challenge.
