Forest Industry Helping baseball

Forest Industry Helping baseball

Forest Industry Helping Baseball. I'm Greg Martin with today's Line On Agriculture.

Anyone who knows me knows that I'm a big baseball fan and a purist as well. No metal bats for me. The U.S. Forest Service has been working with the MLB to make the game a bit safer. David Kretschmann, research engineer at the USDA Forest Products Lab says that, as a result of Forest Service work on the broken bat problem, baseball bat makers are doing a better job producing top quality bats for Major League Baseball.

KRETSCHMANN: There has been a distinct effort now to have a level playing field now for all manufacturers , produce them all to a standardized grading regime and having a third party inspection to go in and check on them and try to improve the quality of their products going out onto the field. And it's had a very distinct and noticeable difference in the number of broken bats that we're seeing out there. Are they still working on things to improve it, yes. We get the broken bat video from the day before, all the bats that broke all across country in all the games and we catalogue them and put them in place. There's actually a person here who reviews the videos and catalogues where was the pitch, what was the manufacturer, how did it end. So we track that every day during the season.

He says there is no such thing as an unbreakable wood bat.

KRETSCHMANN: We've seen a very substantial change and drop in the number of multiple piece failures. Bats will break because people pitch inside or batters reach for those outside pitches and it's an extreme case for a bat and it will break. Our goal has been to try to reduce the number of multiple piece failures which is the safety hazard part of it. And from 2008 until now we have cut it into half.

That's today's Line On Agriculture. I'm Greg Martin on the Ag Information Network. 

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