Lawmakers to weigh safety concerns of aluminum bats for kids

BOSTON --When John Della Volpe's 11-year-old son Andrew stepped onto the pitcher's mound, he wasn't worried.

Andrew was a catcher first but had worked hard at a winter baseball clinic to improve his pitching and was facing an average-looking batter armed with the standard kind of aluminum bat many young players use.

Seconds later, a line drive shot back at him, striking Andrew between the eyes and sending him into the dirt.

"I was seeing it like it was slow motion. It was a rocket back at him. I saw him try to move his glove up and he couldn't make it and it just knocked him off his feet," said Della Volpe, a consultant from Concord who also coaches youth baseball. "It was the scariest thing. There were sheets of blood."

Della Volpe rushed his son to the emergency room where doctors said that if the ball had veered an inch or two left or right, he could have lost an eye, a few inches lower and he could have lost several teeth, and a direct hit on the throat could have been fatal.

Luckily Andrew bounced back and has returned to the baseball diamond, but Della Volpe is adding his voice to the call for restrictions on the use of aluminum bats at youth baseball games.

On Wednesday, Della Volpe plans to join other parents at a legislative hearing looking into ways to make the nation's pastime safer for its youngest players.

Besides the use of aluminum bats versus wooden bats, the Legislature's Committee on Public Health will study other ways to improve safety on the field, from the size of the baseball diamond, to repetitive motion injuries from pitching, to the wisdom of having players of different sizes and skills competing against each other.

But the question of aluminum bats is expected to dominate the discussion.

In the past two decades, non-wood bats (most are not actually made of aluminum), have largely become the norm for youth baseball leagues.

They can make for more exciting play with younger and less powerful hitters.

But that's also raised the concern of some parents and coaches, who say they are putting other players, especially pitchers, in the line of fire.

Part of the concern springs from the nature of the metal bat. Unlike wooden bats, aluminum bats can produce faster speeds and have a bigger so-called "sweet spot" -- the area that produces hard-hit balls.

They also have a "trampoline" effect, essentially allowing balls to bounce off the bat.

Little League officials say there's no evidence that aluminum bats pose more of a hazard than wooden bats. They say over an eight-year period beginning in 1992, injuries to pitchers as a result of batted balls dropped by 76 percent, and has remained low in the years since.

"There is no data currently available that would support the claim that a non-wood bat has a higher rate of injuries associated with its use than wooden bats," said Chris Downs, media relations manager for Little League Baseball and Softball, Williamsport, Penn.

They also argue that other sports, such as inline skating, football and basketball, produce far more injuries than baseball.

Those reassurances aren't working on parents and coaches like Della Volpe. He said aluminum bats have radically changed the nature of the game of youth baseball from the days when he played it in the 1970s.

"It's not real baseball. It's not the way they play it in the pros," said Della Volpe, putting much of the blame on aluminum bats. "They're more like a weapon."

While injuries to pitchers from line drives are some of the most traumatic, far more players suffer injuries from the act of pitching itself, according to Dr. Michael O'Brien, a staff physician at the Division of Sports Medicine at Children's Hospital in Boston.

The number of repetitive motion injuries to the elbow and shoulder has led doctors to recommend young players not exceed specific pitch counts, from no more than 50 pitches a game for 9-10 years olds to no more than 125 pitches per game for 13-14 years olds.

Still, O'Brien said, the most feared injuries come from balls hit to pitchers, who don't wear the head and body gear that a batter or catcher wears, even though such injuries are rare.

"The pitcher has no protection and the velocity off a bat is much faster than a pitch," said O'Brien, who said the slower velocity produced by wooden bats makes them safer than aluminum bats.