THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I can’t find hard statistics on it, but most things I’m reading say 50-55% of the players use maple. Isn’t it hard for the union to take a stand on this when their membership is split down the middle between users and non-users?

Bottom line, if players want to address the problem, they could just stop using the bats.

BTW, great article by Passan. Most of the coverage has been way too hysterical. And quite honestly, I’ve been somewhat surprised by the lionizing of the Rausos in some corners of the baseball blogosphere. I mean, really, I’m supposed to be outraged that MLB has rejected a self-funded study of ten bats when they’ve refused to do a larger-scale test?

All of the writing I have read on this issue is concerned about a player safety.

Perhaps the players don’t care...but at least they have chosen their apathy. If you want to see the issue addressed, raise it as a fan safety issue. This will get MLB’s attention. Change the narrative from ‘Someone is going to die on the field.’ to ‘Someone is going to die in the stands.’

Well, fans don’t seem to care either.

The only time fans have ever voted with their feet, is with excessively long rain delays, or very long extra inning (non-playoff) games.  In those two cases, fans have been quite clear as to what they expect from MLB:

1. Don’t d-ck us around by forcing a game to be played, just so that the team doesn’t get the extra costs with a makeup game or resumption of game

2. When the game lasts too long, we’re not going to wait it out.  Though paradoxically, if you ask the fans point-blank, they will want the players to keep playing to the end, happy to be told the score, without actually needing to watch the game they paid for.

Basically, fans think of immediate gratification.  Fans, you will also remember, remained in the stands after a tragic car race killed fans in the stands.  They simply covered the dead fans in the stands, while the race proceeded, and fans in nearby sections continuing to cheer the race.

Never have the 5 stages of grief been passed through so fast other than by Homer Simpson when he learned he was going to die soon:
http://www.snpp.com/episodes/7F11.html

Dr. H: Now, a little death anxiety is normal.  You can expect to go through five stages.  The first is denial.
Homer: No way!  Because I’m not dying! [hugs Marge]
Dr. H: The second is anger.
Homer: Why you little! [steps towards Dr. H]
Dr. H: After that comes fear.
Homer: What’s after fear?  What’s after fear? [cringes]
Dr. H: Bargaining.
Homer: Doc, you gotta get me out of this!  I’ll make it worth your while!
Dr. H: Finally, acceptance.
Homer: Well, we all gotta go sometime.
Dr. H: Mr. Simpson, your progress astounds me.

I think a reason baseball players don’t think of their brethren as compared to a sports like hockey is because baseball is the most individual of team sports. If there were a similar issue in tennis or golf with racket or club shards flying around, poking people in the eye, I don’t think they’d do much about it.
It’d be interesting to do a correlation between relative level of minimum salary and the degree to which the sport requires cooperation, team work, and stuff like that.
I think it’s similar to how urban areas - which require more interpersonal negotiation and teamwork - tend to breed more liberal economic views.

That’s an interesting point.  When the NBA introduced that new ball, the players were pretty forceful in rejecting it.  Perhaps the other difference is that they all perform the same function.

Other than the goalie, all the players have the same rules.  So, when changes to uniform came down, the players were pretty united in wanting more testing.

In baseball?  Pitcher v batters.  They just don’t see things the same, and so, one side doesn’t care about half the issues.

OSHA’s take on it as of 2 years ago:
http://www.osha.gov/pls/oshaweb/owadisp.show_document?p_table=INTERPRETATIONS&p_id=27301

To those interested in this subject, I recommend reading ATTACHMENT 29 and ARTICLE XIII in the CBA.

In particular, the first three sections of ARTICLE XIII read:

(1) Safety and Health Advisory Committee
The Parties shall establish and maintain a bipartisan Safety and Health Advisory Committee which shall be comprised of an equal number of members representing the Association and representing the Clubs. The purpose of the Committee shall be
(a) to deal with emergency safety and health problems as they arise, and attempt to find solutions, and
(b) to engage in review of, planning for and maintenance of safe and healthful working conditions for Players.

(2) Committee Meetings
A meeting of the Safety and Health Advisory Committee may be called by any member thereof who believes that an emergency safety and health problem exists and requires immediate attention, and a meeting shall be held as soon as practicable thereafter. In addition, the Committee shall hold at least one regular meeting annually for purposes of review and planning.

(3) Power and Authority of Committee
The Safety and Health Advisory Committee shall make recommendations to the Parties as to the solution of problems and the establishment of policies. The Committee shall use its best efforts to persuade the Parties to adopt the Committee’s recommendations.

The Committee, however, shall only have advisory authority and it shall not have the power to impose its views or recommendations upon the Parties.

Paging Passan, Neyer, and Poz: can you find out who is on SHAC, and what they have recommended in the past, and how often they have met?

The work of SHAC led to the research that was done in 2008-09 to determine how/if maple bats shatter differently. The result of that study was changes to some of the standards bat manufacturers had to meet. Per the CBA, the SHAC is composed of equal parts MLB and MLBPA representatives.

For the 2008-09 SHAC meetings which looked into maple bats, here were the committee members and their affiliations at the time. I’ve placed an asterisks next to those who are no longer in the same position, but the SHAC members could be comprised of a completely different list of people at this time.

Sandy Alderson (San Diego Padres)**
Paul Dolan (Cleveland Indians)
Joe Garagiola, Jr. (MLB)
Dan Halem (MLB)
Gerry Hunsicker (Tampa Bay Rays)
Walt Jocketty (Cincinnati Reds)
Howard Smith (MLB)
Dean Taylor (Kansas City Royals)

Phil Bradley (MLBPA)
John Buck (Kansas City Royals)**
Aaron Heilman (New York Mets)**
Bob Lenaghan (MLBPA)
Gene Orza (MLBPA)
Steve Rogers (MLBPA)
Michael Weiner (MLBPA)
Richard White (MLBPA)

I meant to include this… From the September 2008 press release regarding the committee’s work is this overview of what they sought to do:

Since its initial meeting in New York on June 24th, the Safety and Health Advisory Committee has carried out a number of measures in the data collection process. Since July 2nd, MLB Authenticators have collected every bat that has broken during Major League games. To date, more than 1,700 broken bats have been collected for analysis. The Committee has compiled relevant information for each broken bat, including its manufacturer, the model, its dimensions, the situation of the game when it was broken, the area in which the bat fragments landed, and video footage from MLB.com of each broken bat incident. The bat collection concluded on September 7th, based on the experts’ determination that a sufficient number of bats were collected, but the Committee will continue to review video footage daily of each broken bat incident.

The Committee is also conducting a comprehensive quality control survey among all of Major League Baseball’s approved bat suppliers to obtain information regarding the manufacturing process and the suppliers’ quality control processes. Representatives of the Committee have begun a series of meetings with bat suppliers. Additional manufacturers will be visited in the next few weeks. The Committee intends to make both short-term and long-term recommendations to address the issues within its jurisdiction.

Source: http://bit.ly/bkXsOR

Follow up press release 3 months after the one above:

http://mlbplayers.mlb.com/pa/pdf/health_advisory_120908.pdf

Fantastic stuff, thanks for shutting me up about it.

Now, have follow studies been done to test if the recommendations achieved their desired results?

From a NY Times article which was published following Colvin being struck by the bat shard,

The number of broken bats declined about 15 percent this season after falling 35 percent last season, according to Major League Baseball. In 2008, about one bat per game was broken compared to about 0.55 bats broken per game this year. (By comparison, 0.57 bases have been stolen per game in the N.L. this year.)

The decline in the number of broken bats can be attributed mostly to the host of rules introduced last year. In a study of 2,232 broken bats, the league found that maple bats were three times more likely to shatter than bats made with ash. Maple bats are also more likely to explode when they shatter, while ash bats more often splinter into small fragments.

Source: http://nyti.ms/cF33GS

It’s hard to tell from the way that is written if the decline in broken bats is because of fewer maple bats breaking or a decline for all bats.

@#6 OSHA kind of dodged the question in their letter which I see took almost 2 years to write.  Certainly ball players are employees and not contractors, especially those who are not eligible for FA.  Contractors have the ability to choose who (which team) they work for, player-employees do not.

The OSHA admission that they have no regulations that apply to bats or baseball equipment simply means they have not developed them, not that they do not have authority to develop them.  They generally do not act until their is a fatality or injury.

The regulation could be simply a loosely worded regulation saying that bats should not break into pieces which are capable of causing injury by puncture, or they could develop a detailed test method for determining this (or have ANSI or some other standard organization do so and adopt that standard).

Fans are also at risk, but they are on their own. The back of the tickets carry a warning declaring that there are inherent dangers in attending the game. The courts say fans fall under the “assumption of risk” concept, and rarely hold the owners accountable.  Tough luck if your kids brains get pieced by a broken bat.

Maybe a congressional hearing on the subject. Instead of wasting their time with Clemens on his PED use, they can do something productive.

As for the decline in broken bats pointed out, this is not apparent to my lying eyes, which means nothing I guess, but it seems to me I am seeing more broken bats flying closer to IF’ers and going into the stands.  It might be a catch 22 situation in which the force required to break the maple bat has increased, leading to fewer cracked bats, but that when this critical force is reached (combination bat speed + ball velocity), the broken part travels far.  Bats that splinter in a players hand or travel 30 ft are not the problem.

They may be using an inappropriate metric (total of all broken bats) that implies that the number of hazardous projectiles due to broken bats are down, when that may not be the case.  They need to track where these bats land as well to make a proper assessment.