MLB looks to solve broken bat problem

Anyone who has seen a Major League Baseball game the past few years has seen the absurdity: Wooden bats constantly splintering, shattering and breaking, their shards fluttering across the field and occasionally into the stands.

But where the rest of us saw an annoyance and potentially a danger, two fans saw a business  opportunity, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.

Jim Cortez, an entrepreneur in Chicago, and Greg Kendra, who is a real-estate agent in Denver, came up with a process by which bats are cryogenically frozen at minus-310 degrees Fahrenheit for up to 24 hours, and then slowly allowed to come back to ambient temperature.

They have had their bats tested by an independent university laboratory and claim in their patent filing they are 26 percent stronger than standard bats.

They have filed paperwork with Major League Baseball to have their bats certified for use, but say they have heard nothing back from the league.

An MLB spokesman declined to comment on the frozen bats, and instead pointed to a US Forest Service laboratory in Madison, Wis., that was tasked at the end of the 2008 season with getting to the bottom of the rash of broken bats.

According to Dave Kretschmann, the Forest Service researcher in charge of the project, the lab collected more than 2,000 bats that broke in Major League games between July 1 and Sept. 7, 2008. The primary problem, he said, was a widespread manufacturing defect called slope of grain.

In short, the grain on handles of the bats was not straight, something that he said should have been caught in the inspection process by individual bat makers.

"If the slope of grain is off by as much as three percent, it can weaken the bat pretty significantly," Kretschmann said. "That's because wood is very weak perpendicular to the grain."

The problem of broken bats was further exacerbated, Kretschmann said, by the advent of maple bats over traditional ash, and the changing geometry of bats.

Baseball bats used to be "balanced," said Chuck Schupp, a major-league representative for Louisville Slugger, a bat maker. That means that if a bat was 32 inches long, it weighed 32 ounces. By Schupp's memory, Yankees outfielder Paul O'Neill was the last player to use a balance bat (34 inches and 34 ounces).

Today, the trend is toward lighter bats, with bigger barrels and thinner handles. The design changes are primarily intended to increase bat speed, a factor that many hitters consider key to hitting home runs.

But to make lighter bats with bigger barrels that taper to thinner handles, manufacturers have to use wood that is less dense.

The best wood for bats, most experts agree, is ash. But a decade ago, players — encouraged by bat makers —discovered maple, a less-dense wood that played into the widely held belief that bat speed is everything. Barry Bonds was an early adopter of maple.

Major League Baseball still allows maple bats, but has tightened up rules based upon the findings of the Forest Service lab. Manufacturers have had to come up with new, more stringent inspection processes to make sure the slope of the grain in the handle is not off by more than three percent.

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