The NEW Bat Facts
You can't take your old bats up to the plate in college and high school
anymore.
Both the national college and high school boards governing athletics recently
changed their standards for baseball bats in an effort to make aluminum bats
more closely approximate the action of wood bats.
Under the new rules, the maximum diameter of bats will be reduced from 2 3/4
inches to 2 5/8 inches. In addition, a bat's length-to-weight ratio will be
reduced from -5 ounces to -3 ounces (that means a bat can't weight more than
three ounces less than its length in inches. For example, a 34-inch bat must
weigh at least 31 ounces).
The overall effect of the rule changes is to make bats thinner and heavier.
Officials of both the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) and the
National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) said it would make
aluminum bats much more like wooden bats.
The rule changes were prompted by a 1999 NCAA panel that sought to determine
whether changes in aluminum bat technology had gone too far in favoring the
hitter. After the study, the panel determined that the speed of a baseball hit
by an aluminum bat should not exceed that of a typical wooden bat used by Major
League Baseball players.
The NCAA first adopted the new standards last year and the NFHS followed suit a
short time later.
"The game of high school baseball is in good shape," said NFHS
President Dick Durost. "Even so, we need to stay vigilant to ways in which
technology is having an impact. The new rule will make the physical dimensions
of non-wood bats more closely mirror those of wood bats."
The new regulations went into effect January 1 of this year for college
baseball, and will go into effect January 1, 2001 for high school baseball.
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