Building a better baseball bat

New York Times : An occupational hazard of the sport of baseball is the occasional shattering of the wooden bats as the players let fly their powerful swings. During the 2010 season, Welington Castillo, playing for the Chicago Cubs, swung the bat so hard that it exploded when it met the ball and sent a shard of wood flying at his teammate Tyler Colvin, who was impaled a few inches from his heart. The problem stems from the increasing use of maple bats, which have surpassed ash in popularity because they have a harder surface and, therefore, more “pop.” Although all wooden bats can break, maple is more likely to break catastrophically. To find out why, authorities from Major League Baseball teamed up with members of the US Forest Service. According to David Kretschmann, a Forest Service scientist, one reason is that maple’s grain is harder to see than that of ash, and therefore harder to follow when carving the bats. New rules for producing maple bats have reduced the number of shattering incidents over the past four years.