Maple Bat Research Paper

A pierced lung, a season-ending injury, and a heartbroken team, all originating from a single baseball bat. In September of 2010 the Chicago Cubs experienced this all in a matter of minutes when a broken bat pieced baserunner Tyler Colvin in the chest. Colvin, a rising rookie in the Cubs franchise, was running from third base to home plate when the bat of teammate Wellington Castillo shattered and penetrated Colvin’s upper chest. Although Colvin did manage to score, he was sent to the hospital where he was treated for a collapsed lung. Unfortunately, the shattering of a baseball bat is all too common in Major League Baseball games. Players, coaches, umpires and even fans have been targets of shattered bats. Since maple bats were introduced in the early 2000s, the …show more content…
According to the Washington Post, in the year 2010 about 70 percent of Major League Baseball Players batted with maple bats, while 25 percent used ash, and the remaining 5 percent used birch (Khurshudyan 2014). Many credit the popularity of maple to Barry Bonds who broke the single-season home run record in 2001 using a maple bat. Although its use in baseball is recorded back to the mid-20th century, it was not until 2001 when Barry Bonds broke the single-season home run record with a maple bat that it became popular (Barringer 2013). Almost all maple bats currently used originate from the sugar, otherwise known as rock or hard maple trees. Found mainly in Canada and the United States, maple trees provides a hardness and durability that appeal to many ball players (Freedman 2014). To them, maple is the “perfect” choice because a solid and sturdy bat means a long lasting bat. In one way this is true because maple bats break less compared to other bat types. However, it has been proved that when maple bats do break, they shatter into sharp fragments such as what hit Tyler Colvin (Khurshudyan