Don Long and maple bats, one year later

Saturday, March 14, 2009 | Feedback | Print Entry

Don Long, the hitting coach for the Pittsburgh Pirates, ventured over to the back fields at the Phillies' complex in Clearwater, Fla., on Friday afternoon to see old friends. Watching their eyes, he could see them drawn to the scar that runs vertically down the right side of his face, and they'd ask how he is doing.

He is doing fine, almost a year after the barrel of a maple bat tumbled into his cheek, gashing him badly. In the aftermath of the injury to Long, and injuries to others, Major League Baseball and the Players Association studied the viability of maple bats and adopted higher standards for their manufacturing and quality. Among the changes:
  1. All bats must conform to slope of grain wood grading requirements which apply to the 2/3 length of the billet that will constitute the handle and taper regions of the bat. All manufacturers must identify and grade the handle end prior to production of the bat to ensure that its slope of grain satisfies the grading requirement.

  2. All manufacturers must place an ink dot on the tangential face of the handle of sugar maple and yellow birch bats before finishing. Placing an ink dot enables a person to easily view the slope of grain of the wood.

  3. The orientation of the hitting surface on sugar maple and maple bats should be rotated 90° (one quarter turn of the bat). The edge grain in maple that is currently used as the hitting surface is the weaker of the two choices. To facilitate such a change in the hitting surface, manufacturers must rotate the logos they place on these bats by 90°.

  4. Manufacturers must implement a method of tracking each bat they supply (e.g., serial number) so that each can be linked back to the manufacturer's production records.

  5. Manufacturers should be visited on a regular basis by MLB or its designated representatives to audit each company's manufacturing processes and recordkeeping with respect to bat traceability.
It's far too soon to know whether the changes have made the bats safer, and in turn, made the game safer for players, for umpires, for fans.

But drawing from his own limited observations this spring, Long noted that he'd seen only a handful of bats broken -- far fewer than the staggering number of broken bats that seemed to be flying around parks last year.

"So far this spring, in our games, I think I've seen three bats actually come apart," said Long. "Last year, it was every night. Last year, if you didn't see one come apart, it seemed unusual."

Long is not advocating a ban on maple bats. "My feeling was two-fold -- one, let's see if there's a way to make a better product," he said. "And two, from the standpoint of a hitting coach, if the hitters feel like it can help them, even if it's psychological, then I have to lend some credibility to that. The things that they've tried to do are the next step in the process.

"It's definitely a step in the right direction, and hopefully it'll take care of the problem. There were too many people that were vulnerable."

On April 15 of last year, Long was standing in the visitors' dugout at Dodger Stadium, watching Nate McLouth bat. The Pirates' center fielder pulled a ball into the right-field corner, and as Long turned his head to see the ball into the corner, the splintered barrel of McLouth's bat -- helicoptering through the air -- crashed into Long's face.

He was only the first to get hurt. A woman in Dodger Stadium had her jaw smashed by a bat, not long after Long was hurt. Umpire Brian O'Nora was bloodied when the barrel of a bat tumbled into his head. Pitcher Hayden Penn, working in a game in the minor leagues, was cut in the leg. It felt to many like a game of Russian roulette, with only time standing between Major League Baseball and a horrendous tragedy.

Long still has some numbness in his cheek, and he can feel that in his upper lip. But he can smile "somewhat normally" now, he said. "The first five or six months after it happened, that side of my face was somewhat droopy, and I couldn't bring that side of my face up. I knew it was going to come back, because I had nerve tests done and they said it wasn't completely severed. It was damaged, but it regenerates."

• A New Jersey batmaker is producing a shatterproof bat.

 
 

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  • Buster Olney Buster Olney

    Buster Olney is a senior writer at ESPN The Magazine. He began covering baseball in 1989, as the Nashville Banner's beat reporter assigned to the Triple-A Nashville Sounds. Later, he covered the San Diego Padres (1993-94), the Baltimore Orioles ('95-96), the New York Mets ('97) and the Yankees ('98-2001). Olney joined ESPN The Magazine in 2003, after six years at The New York Times, and he's the author of the Times' best-seller "The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty," a book about the Paul O'Neill-Tino Martinez Yankees dynasty of 1996-01.

    He grew up in central Vermont collecting baseball cards and listening to Red Sox, Expos, Phillies and Pirates radio broadcasts, and was a rabid fan of the Los Angeles Dodgers. He graduated from Vanderbilt University the same year as hoops legend Will Perdue, and ranks among the all-time leading scorers in pickup basketball at Memorial Gym. He claims to have witnessed the Commodores' winning football season in 1982 (although anthropologists have not yet confirmed this).

    Olney also contributes to ESPN.com, ESPN Radio, ESPNEWS, "SportsCenter" and "Baseball Tonight."

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