Overview
Throughout much of their history, baseball and softball bats have been manufactured from wood. The first commercially distributed aluminum bat was introduced in 1970. In the mid 1970s, Worth pioneered the one-piece aluminum bat, and Easton brought significant advancements to the quality of the aluminum used in metal bats. Players and coaches at amateur levels quickly began to prefer aluminum bats over wood for their advantages in performance and durability.
Wood Bats
Typically made of ash, maple or hickory, wood bats were the only type of bat commercially available for over the first 100 years of baseball. Due to their reduced performance and durability versus metal bats, wood bats are not commonly used by amateur softball or baseball players today. At the professional level, wood bats are mandatory, and maple is slowly becoming the wood of choice due to its supposed performance advantages. Maple’s propensity to shatter much more often than ash, however, raises questions regarding the safety of using maple bats in play, according to WoodBat.org. Hickory is rarely used today because of its weight relative to maple and ash bats.
Single-Wall Aluminum Bats
This is the simplest type of metal bat. The bat basically consists of a hollow metal tube shaped into a traditional bat shape. Most aluminum and composite bats also have a built-in padded wrap that is added to the bottom 10 to 15 inches of the bat above the knob. Single-wall aluminum bats tend to be the cheapest and lowest performing of all aluminum bats.
Multi-Wall Aluminum Bats
These bats are manufactured with materials similar to those in single-wall aluminum bats; however, they feature an outer metal tube with one or more smaller metal tubes within. This design significantly increases the “trampoline effect” when the ball strikes the bat. Multi-wall aluminum bats tend to be more expensive than single-wall bats and typically have top batted ball speeds, above single-wall aluminum bats.
Composite Bats
Originally introduced in the mid 1980s, composite bats were made of graphite and suffered from poor performance relative to aluminum bats. Composite bats did not gain popularity until the early 2000s when carbon fiber composite bats began to significantly outperform double-wall bats. By the mid to late 2000s, composite bats were considered to be the highest performing and most expensive bats on the market. These bats generally feature a larger “sweet spot,” easier swing mechanics and lower vibration, which results in better performance for the average player under normal game conditions.
Why Metal/Composite Bats Outperform Wood
Wood bats suffer from several disadvantages over any type of metal or composite bat. Metal bats can be swung faster, have wider sweet spots, rarely break, and their hollow nature allows for a “trampoline effect” when striking a ball. All of these factors create much higher batted ball speed, and thus more carry, when a ball is hit by a metal bat.
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