David Price Leaves Game With Apparent Hand Injury

I watched a lot of games last year, and I don’t remember seeing other bats shatter the way the maple ones did and with the frequency. Something needs to be done, whether it is tampering or the wood species.

Ryan Braun, the outstanding second-year Brewers left fielder, said that players won’t change anything unless MLB mandates it.

“It’s definitely dangerous,” he said. “Bats break every single game even when balls are hit right on the barrel. At the same time, it’s a preference thing, and until baseball implements something — makes it a rule that they are illegal — guys are not going to switch. They like using the [maple] bats and they like the results.”

Even Pittsburgh’s Long, the man who so far has been in the center of it, said some preliminary steps should be taken before maple bats are banned.

“I think step one is to explore options for keeping moisture in the wood to make them more pliable and potentially less resistant to breaking,” he said. “Let’s play around with the length-to-weight ratio and see if that makes a difference. Let’s start there. And then if they try every conceivable thing and it just doesn’t work, then maybe you do have to [ban them]. But that might be a little extreme in the short term.”