Oh, How I've Longed for the Ping of the Bat

Crossing the campus of Shepherd University today, I looked to my left and saw the college baseball team practicing on the diamond. This time of year is spring training for them, too. The warm weather, the bright sunshine, and baseball are only a few short weeks away. Let's all welcome them, these harbingers of spring - the green grass of the outfield, the deep brown of the infield, the satisfying smack of leather on leather, and the ping of bat on ball.

No, they don't use wooden bats in collegiate baseball. They've been swinging aluminum for my entire life and longer - the NCAA legalized metal bats in 1974, and they've never looked back. Since I was a kid, I've wondered why exactly high school and college baseball leagues allow their players to swing metal bats, knowing that the pros still use only wood. (Players in little leagues all over the U.S. have been using aluminum bats since the early 1970s, but I've never wondered about that; the answer is obvious: children need the performance advantages of an aluminum bat because they are stupid and incompetent.) It turns out how the NCAA switched to aluminum bats is actually an interesting and hilarious story.

Back a way's, in the summer of 1859, two fellows were sitting together under a shade tree in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. They lazed beneath the tree's welcoming canopy of gently rustling branches, passing the afternoon with placid, inoffensive conversation, sipping mint juleps (as men of their station often did), until one of them propped himself up in his chair and said to his friend, "I say, old man, I do believe that if a squad of young bucks from my dear old Amherst were to play opposite a team from your alma mater in a game of base, it would be the most lopsided bloodletting since the Mexican-American War!"

The other fellow, an old Williams College man, took great offense, as any one of us would in his situation, and stormed off, threatening to return shortly with a group of fine young base-ball players whose sole objective would be to make his friend from Amherst eat his boastful words. Shortly thereafter, a team from Amherst met that team from Williams in the first intercollegiate baseball game ever played. The Amherst squad won by a score of 73-32, though it should be noted that they were playing under Massachusetts rules, which mandated that the game continued until one team fled the field weeping futile, humiliated tears, as opposed to the more familiar New York rules.

And from this tiny seed grew the mighty oak of college baseball. In a few short years (the intermission that was the War Between the States notwithstanding) every college and university worth its salt (no light analogy, that, for salt was highly valued in those days) was fielding a school baseball team. By the turn of the 20^th century, collegiate baseball was the hottest thing going, more popular than dog fighting and cinematographic pornography exhibitions combined.

But with this success came hidden perils. As the college game captured the imagination of the public, so too did its professional counterpart, major league baseball. Soon enough, the ticket-buying fans had left behind their college heroes in favor of pro superstars like Elmer Flick, Ginger Beaumont, and a young firebrand named Heinie Zimmerman. The first solution proposed by the powers-that-were within the NCAA was simply to encourage major league teams to sign more of their college players to pro contracts. This effort soon floundered when most college players, as educated men, declined to enter into unending indentured servitude under the heartless lash of major league owners like Andrew Freedman, Joseph Lannin, and the notorious Marge Schott, who had won the Cincinnati Reds from John T. Brush in a game of Turkish roulette in 1902.

Salvation finally arrived for college baseball in 1924, for it was this year when inventor and future presidential assassin William Shroyer received a patent for the first aluminum baseball bat. Shroyer's invention proved immediately popular - if you closely study the photograph of 1925 American League Batting Champion Harry Heilmann accompanying this article, you will see that he was using an early model Easton Magnum, which goes a long way toward explaining how he managed to hit .736 that year, a mark that went unequaled until 1933, when Jimmie Foxx batted .749 using a shaft of bamboo filled with concrete for most of the season. Did I mention the aluminum bat also allowed Heilmann to hit 94 homeruns that year? Because it did.

Seeing that this would radically alter the game they had spent most of the century choking into submission, the American and National League owners gathered together and agreed unanimously to ban metal bats from their games. They also took the opportunity to reaffirm their gentlemen's agreement to exclude African American players, and any Hispanic players unable to pass as dark-complected Italians. Then they ate big steaks and drank expensive wines, and laughed and laughed and laughed.

With the banishment of the aluminum bat from the majors, college baseball leagues saw an opportunity to stake out their own territory, far outside the shadow of the major leagues. Things had never been worse when the college baseball magnates met on a bitter afternoon in the winter of 1973 (for it had taken several decades for the involved parties to agree on a meeting place before finally settling on the Howard Johnson's in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania): even fans of college athletics had long ago abandoned baseball in favor of football and basketball, whose greatest players often graduated to fame and fortune in the pros. By comparison, college baseball seemed an exercise in futility.

After several hours of fist-pounding, shirt-rending, and (it must be said) rather womanish crying, the athletic director for Fresno State spoke up. "What if," he proposed, "we allow our players to use aluminum bats? This would not only inflate the statistics of our players, rendering their accomplishments utterly meaningless when judged by the standards of the major leagues, but would also give our version of the sport a totally unique signature sound, a hip, modern high-pitched metallic twang instead of that stodgy old, immensely satisfying, universally beloved crack of bat on ball."

The proposal passed unanimously, and from that point on college baseball has been a runaway success. Last year, ticket sales from NCAA Division I baseball games totaled in excess of $50,000. And the benefits stretched far beyond the campuses of America's baseball-crazed colleges and universities, as the majors were forced to implement a massive four-tiered system of developmental leagues in order to give players just out of colleges and high schools a few years to get used to swinging wooden bats and remember what the hell sport they were playing, guaranteeing there would be plenty of baseball for everyone, for years to come!