By Staff
Coaching Management, 9.1, February 2001, http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0901/bbthurston.htm
Amherst College Head Coach Bill Thurston has been actively tracking the bat-performance issue for several years. He has previously published three studies, each of which showed a major difference in bat performance between aluminum and wood.
In October, he published his fourth statistical study, this one looking at the bats used during the 2000 spring and summer seasons. Thurston’s aim was to see if the NCAA’s new three-prong bat standards, which went into effect for the first time last year, would alter his previous findings.
As in previous studies, only Division I players were included. Thurston compared their NCAA stats with their stats from playing in the summer Cape Cod League, where wood bats are used. His findings: the statistical differences between wood and aluminum were consistent with past years’ studies.
Thurston looked at 92 players, including only those hitters who had a minimum of 70 at-bats in the Cape Cod League. With an aluminum bat, 70 percent of the Division I players studied hit over .300; with a wood bat, only 9 percent of the same hitters hit over .300. The differences were also marked when it came to slugging percentage: 45 percent of Division I players had a slugging percent over .500 with aluminum, while with a wood bat only 2 percent of the same hitters slugged over .500. Thurston also looked at home-run and strike-out frequency, RBIs, and runs scored, and found similar differentials.
In comparing statistics between 1999 and 2000, the difference in batting average between aluminum and wood remained the same at .086, home runs per at bat between aluminum and wood changed from minus 56 percent in 1999 to minus 58 percent in 2000, and slugging percentage difference decreased slightly from minus .197 in 1999 to minus .171 in 2000.
While some have argued that most Cape Cod League teams have better pitching than a regular college roster—thus contributing to lower stats with the wood bats—Thurston responds by noting that the average Cape Cod squad has more good hitters than the average NCAA team. He also points out that few of the NCAA’s top pitchers (based on earned-run average) played in the Cape Cod League the past two seasons. “It is obvious that the wood bat Cape Cod League was not dominated by top-ranked college pitchers,” he writes.
Assessing the impact of the NCAA’s recently implemented bat standards, Thurston writes: “Looking at the results of the 2000 study, obviously [the new standards] have not accomplished what the NCAA Baseball Rules Committee originally desired. The game is still way off balance and the risk of injury to pitchers continues to be much greater when metal bats are used ... I believe the only positive thing the NCAA has accomplished was to prevent the bat-performance race from continuing to escalate as it had through the 1990s.
“Based on the results of this comprehensive study, I believe it is obvious that the collegiate game played with the metal bats is not remotely close to the game played with wood,” Thurston writes in the conclusion to his study. “For the good of the game and the safety of the players, I hope that in the near future aluminum bat performance and standards will be bought back to the traditional wood level.”