http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yyeLrLrLA48
I mean c’mon I’m 135lbs and hitting strikes from the batting cages with my wooden bat…its just ridiculous.
Steven but with less velocity it would have hit him in the head…metal lighter than wood and therefor the ball will go farther.
By: Addicted2Fishing
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Does the fraction of a second matter in that situation? No! Wood bat or Metal bat it still would have struck him the same place before he could react.
A linedrive at a pitcher’s head is a line drive on a metal or wood bat. Still would have hit this pitcher in the head. And for the one saying that they should wear helmets it’s not going to happen because well it hit him in the face not the top of his head.
I’d go a different route – I’d make pitchers wear helmets just like batters and base coaches have to wear helmets in the pros this year
I was a pitcher in high school and college, and I nearly killed a coach in batting practice (I hit the coach pitching BP squarely in the temple in a similar fashion as the video you posted and he was in the hospital for over 2 weeks….). I also had several close calls when pitching where I missed being hit in the head by a batted ball by fractions of an inch or fractions of a second (depending on whether I got my glove on the line drive or whether I dodged the ball for my own survivial.)
Some pitcher WILL be killed by a line drive (if one hasn’t been already) either in college or in the MLB in the next few years because the reaction time of pitchers simply isn’t fast enough to dodge or catch every line drive hit at them.
wooded bats break more and cuz more injuries than Metal bats,so it evens its self out in the injury department….just a freak thing that happens 1-2 a yr….
I don’t like metal bats. The ball come off a metal bat faster and with more sorce than wi8tha wooden bat. A college pitcher was killed a few years ago when hit in the head with a line drive off a metal bat. In 2005 a minor league pitcher, Steve Brook with the River City Rascals suffered a hairline fracture of the skull when hit by a line drive in Richmond, In. He survived pitched the next two seasons and is now the Rascals pitching coach. If the ball had been hit with a metal bat it would have had more force behind it and Steve might nit be with us today. I say ban the metal bats
Pitchers get hit with balls struck by wood bats too. Its not wood vs metal its the technology that goes into the metal bats. This is one of the reason college made the rule change a few years ago to increase the weight of the bats and they need to look at what alloy or materials the bats are being made out of. From a purely financial standpoint, I don’t think you are ever going to see College ban metal bats, and with the emerald ash borer killing off ash trees I don’t think there would be enough good ash available to make that many wood bats.
They can make a metal bat that hits the ball more like a wood bat. If you hit a ball on the sweet spot of a wood bat, vs the sweet spot on a metal bat, its not as much of a difference as you might think. Its just that the sweet spot on a metal bat is about 10 times larger, so you get more “pure” hits.