Baseball, Bad for you or Good for you

By: Jiying Qi
Thunk the sound of baseball on metal not wood,
feeeeeeeeeeewwwwwwwww (ball flying through the
air) thunk ouch yee woo yee woo (siren) game ended.
Now this is one in many baseball games that someone
hit by a line drive straight to his or her forehead and
getting brain damage and many scars. How will we
make baseball safer? I thought of banning metal bats.
Metal bats can injure you severely while wooden bats
might shatter. There are many reasons why metal bats
could injure you severely and much more than wood
can.
1. Metal bats have the tendency to hit a baseball
farther and faster than wooden bats. The barrel of
an aluminum bat is hollow and lighter so a batter
can swing the bat with more force and has a
trampoline effect.
2. When a ball hits a wooden bat, it compresses to
nearly half its original diameter, losing up to 75%
of its energy to the friction force of the ball.
However, the metal bat is like a spring and
pushes the ball forward dramatically.
3. The physics and acoustics of a metal bat are
dangerous. The amount of reaction time for a
pitcher is .4 of a second, a ball leaving at 97
miles will arrive at the pitchers mound in less
than .4 of a second, while a ball being hit from a
metal bat arrive .02 seconds slower. The
difference in arrival times is only .038 seconds.
To help with a perspective for the .02 s
 differences consider that it takes .095s to blink an
eye. In other words, the difference in arrival
times is only 1/5 of the time to blink an eye. Now
that is fast!
4. Another reason is metal bats can hurt your body
severely only by using the bat. Baseball players
can throw the bat back while running while it hit
the ball. In addition, surprise the catcher or
whoever is standing behind the pitcher and
seriously injures them.
5. One example is one boy named Gunnar Sandberg
after being bonked in the head by a line drive off
an aluminum bat, he was sent in medically
induced coma and had a portion of his skull
removed to relieve the pressure caused by the
swelling in the brain. Ouch!
Should metal baseball bats be banned? Think about
it, baseball will be safer and less people will get hurt.
We all want to be in a utopia right but how is it a
utopia when people get hurt pointlessly.