Although preliminary reports were not available at the time of this writing, Holman says most participating teams had broken all 18 wood bats allocated to them after about six weeks. Researchers from Illinois State University's School of Kinesiology and Recreation studied more than 500 games and 20,000 at-bats involving about 50 teams and tracked everything from number of base and extra-base hits, runs scored and game lengths to batted-ball injuries and broken bats. The IHSA received $20,000 from the NFHS last spring to oversee a study in which five conferences instructed players to use wood bats in conference play and metal bats in non-conference games. "The speculation has always been that if we went to wood bats, we would reduce injuries," Hopkins says, acknowledging the work of scientific experts who have studied batted balls for decades. The problem with analyzing injury data is that researchers cannot control for all of the possible factors involved, thus making it difficult (if not impossible) to accurately predict injury risk. "Quite honestly, we played 300,000 baseball games in Illinois two years ago and we had two significant injuries. So people think they occur more often than they do," says Anthony Holman, assistant executive director of the Illinois High School Association. "When a batted-ball injury happens, it's traumatic and it gets a lot of play in the media.
"There is no fair, just or reasonable connection between the bat ordinance and the health and welfare of New York City high school baseball players," members of a coalition known as "Don't Take My Bat Away" claimed in the lawsuit, which was filed in United States District Court for the Southern District of New York. Then, in May, a newly formed group representing parents and coaches of New York City prep players, USA Baseball, the National High School Baseball Coaches Association and bat manufacturers sued the city of New York to prevent the ban - which was scheduled to take effect in September and would impact more than 9,600 student-athletes on approximately 600 teams in the city's five boroughs. Council member James Oddo, who wrote the ordinance, told reporters that he "sensed" wood bats would make for "a better game, a purer game and a safer game." The great bat debate took an unexpected turn in April when the New York City Council outlawed aluminum and other metal-alloy bats, citing evidence that they produce harder-hit balls that increase the risk of injury to opposing players, particularly pitchers.
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