Baseball History Is No Longer Written With Ash Bats Baseball - Playoffs HEAD TOPICS

Baseball History Is No Longer Written With Ash Bats

10/21/2022 7:18:00 AM

Invasive insects and batter preferences have led to the elimination of the wood that dominated the sport for generations There may not be a single ash bat used in this postseason

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NYT Science

“Nature has a very resilient way of hanging in there,” Rosa Yoo said of the state of North America’s white ash forests. “I believe there will still be ash, but it will be a long time before it can get back to where it was.” Invasive insects and batter preferences have led to the elimination of the wood that dominated the sport for generations There may not be a single ash bat used in this postseason “There’s dead ash trees everywhere,” Yoo said. “It’s hard to find an ash tree anywhere that hasn’t been infested.”Among native tree species, ash represents a tiny fraction of the continental woodlands. But there is one arena where ash has historically reigned: in baseball. Credit...In 2001, Hillerich & Bradsby was producing roughly 800,000 ash bats a year, with many of them going to scores of major leaguers. Today, the company retains only one ash devotee: Evan Longoria of the San Francisco Giants, whose team did not make the postseason. Read more:
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My New Favorite Futbolista will introduce you to the World Cup’s most inspiring soccer players and the causes they champion. New episodes hosted by former Colombian striker Juan Pablo Ángel and LX News host Eric Alvarez will drop November 1 in English and Spanish. Read more >> NLCS: Austin Nola opens Padres floodgates with RBI off his little brother and Phillies starter AaronAaron and Austin Nola made baseball history on Wednesday as the first brothers to ever face off in an MLB playoff game. Coal ash pollution affecting lakes for longer than anticipatedCoal ash pollution of surface waters near power plants has been more persistent and widespread than was previously thought. Scholar: HBO’s ‘House of the Dragon’ Was Inspired by a Real Medieval Dynastic Struggle Over a Female RulerPopular fantasy, unencumbered by the competing priority of “getting it right,” can, in broad strokes, reflect the values of the medieval society that inspires it, writes this historian. “House of the Dragon” is one of those TV shows. — The Conversation Ketchikan celebrates Filipino American history, culture at 2nd annual Fil-Am Festival“To put it simply, the history of the Filipino American experience in Alaska is the history of Alaska itself, and it should never be forgotten,” said Rep. Mary Peltola, one of many guests at Ketchikan's Fil-Am Festival last weekend. Ketchikan celebrates Filipino American history, culture at 2nd annual Fil-Am FestivalKetchikan came together last weekend to celebrate Filipino American History Month at the second annual Fil-Am Festival. There were speeches, trivia contests, outreach for health and voting — and a lot of food. Zach Schonbrun Oct.By October 19, 2022 at 7:36 pm EDT Expand San Diego Padres' Austin Nola hits an RBI-single during the fifth inning in Game 2 of the baseball NL Championship Series between the San Diego Padres and the Philadelphia Phillies on Wednesday, Oct.Coal ash being released into an ash pond.. 20, 2022 CLINTON TOWNSHIP, N.J. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis) By October 19, 2022 at 7:36 pm EDT Aaron and Austin Nola as the first brothers to ever face off in an MLB playoff game. — On a glorious autumn afternoon, Rosa Yoo stepped off a road at the Round Valley Recreation Area and plunged into the woods to perform the grimmest task of her job as the New Jersey Forest Service’s health specialist: checking on the status of the white ash trees. The findings show that large quantities of coal ash have been transferred and deposited in lake sediments since the beginning of coal operations in the state. She arrived at a clearing, where a grove of ghostly gray husks cut haunting figures amid the colorful foliage. Aaron, 29 got the start on the mound for the Philadelphia Phillies in their Game 2 NLCS matchup against the San Diego Padres. As she suspected, the trees, whose canopies a year ago painted the landscape in gold and maroon, were dead or hastily dying. Left with his young daughter Rhaenyra, he decides to make her a ruling queen, a role the girl relishes as she seeks to change “the order of things. “There’s dead ash trees everywhere,” Yoo said. He came to the plate in the fifth inning with his Padres trailing 4-2 and Ha-seong Kim standing on first base.” Coal ash is the residual material from burning coal to generate electricity, and is known to contain lead, chromium, cadmium, mercury, arsenic, selenium and molybdenum, many of which have been tied to human cancers and other health effects. “It’s hard to find an ash tree anywhere that hasn’t been infested.” Infested, she means, by an invasive insect called the emerald ash borer , which for years has been munching its way across North America, leaving huge patches of dead forest in its wake. Austin hit an 0-2 sinker off his brother into right centerfield. Among native tree species, ash represents a tiny fraction of the continental woodlands. “These are recreational lakes,” said Zhen Wang, who led published in Environmental Science & Technology . But there is one arena where ash has historically reigned: in baseball. Call it brotherly love 😉. Henry I then turned to arranging a marriage for Matilda so she could give birth to a grandson and buttress her position. Most of baseball history has been written with ash bats, from Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941 to Roger Maris’s 61 home runs in 1961 to Mark McGwire’s 70 homers in 1998. Image Babe Ruth was known for swinging an extra-large ash bat in his years of domination with the Yankees.” The five lakes in the study, however, were created for nearby coal plants: Hyco Lake and Mayo Lake, north of Durham in Person County; Belews Lake, northwest of Greensboro in Rockingham, Forsyth and Stokes Counties; Mountain Island Lake, northwest of Charlotte in Mecklenburg County; and Lake Sutton, northwest of Wilmington in Brunswick County. Credit... They noticed that at several of the sites, coal ash was initially dumped into the nearby lake. The New York Times Babe Ruth swung ash bats weighing 46 ounces. Ty Cobb had his crafted for him by a coffin maker. Ted Williams used to travel to the factory of Hillerich & Bradsby, the maker of the Louisville Slugger, to select the lumber he wanted carved into his bats. The study authors suggest the coal ash could reach lakes by three possible routes: Atmospheric emissions of coal ash, particularly before the installation of the scrubbers, settled in nearby lands and was washed back into the lake by its watershed; climate events like tropical storms and hurricanes flooded and flushed the nearby coal ash impoundments to overflow into the nearby lakes, and ordinary flows of effluents from the coal ash ponds reached the lake as part of their routine operation. Today, however, ash has all but died out of baseball as the trees face beetle-driven extinction. This postseason, which stretches from early October to early November and began with 12 teams and more than 300 players, may be the first in generations that does not register a single plate appearance with an ash bat. In 2001, Hillerich & Bradsby was producing roughly 800,000 ash bats a year, with many of them going to scores of major leaguers. Now we see it’s already in the open environment. Today, the company retains only one ash devotee: Evan Longoria of the San Francisco Giants, whose team did not make the postseason. It is as if all Major League Baseball stadiums suddenly stopped selling hot dogs. When Jack Marucci started making bats for his son in a backyard shed in the early 2000s, the wood he picked up at the lumber yard was ash. “The phenomenon that we discovered probably applies to many other sites across the US and all of them are going to be vulnerable to more extreme weather events and flooding that we know is coming from global warming. Because what else would he choose? “That was the staple,” Marucci said. “All I knew was ash bats.” The company he started, Marucci Sports, and its sister brand, Victus, now make bats for more than half of the players in the big leagues. Only five Marucci customers requested ash this season: Joey Votto, Javier Báez, Kevin Plawecki, Tim Beckham and Kiké Hernández, none of whom made the playoffs. There may be a handful of others, like Brad Miller of the Texas Rangers. But for the Yankees this season came off the barrel of a maple bat. Image Aaron Judge used maple bats, rather than ash, to hit 62 home runs in 2022, breaking Roger Maris’s single-season record in the American League. Credit... Mustafa Hussain for The New York Times Image Maple bats became popular with players over the last 20 years because they are hard but light. Ash bats, though, have more spring. Credit... Mustafa Hussain for The New York Times Pete Tucci, the founder of Tucci Limited in Norwalk, Conn. , thumbed through his logbooks trying to pinpoint the last client who came to him seeking ash bats. “It was Omar Narváez,” said Tucci, referring to the Milwaukee Brewers catcher. “He ordered six ash bats in spring training in 2020.” And that was it. The transformation has not gone unnoticed. A former first-round pick of the Toronto Blue Jays in 1996, Tucci swung only ash bats during his career. He tried maple, which was gaining ground in the late 1990s. He didn’t like it. “I kept trying it because other guys were liking it,” Tucci said. “But I’d always go back to ash. ” Baseball hitters are legendarily intuitive, and Tucci was no different. Because ash is a softer wood, with a looser grain structure, it can be more susceptible to splintering or flaking. But in the barrel, the so-called sweet spot, the softer ash bats can flex upon contact, producing a “trampoline” effect on the ball. “The grain kind of creates a bit of a groove,” Tucci said. “I felt like that groove caught the ball a little bit more and produced more backspin. I felt like I got more performance out of an ash bat than a maple bat.” When he got into bat making, though, in 2009, it was a different story. Joe Carter was the first notable star to experiment with a maple bat, in the 1990s. But after Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001 swinging a maple Sam Bat from the Original Maple Bat Corporation, a Canadian company, dozens of others followed, opting for maple’s hard-but-light combination. It is a good thing, too. Because just as maple was gaining popularity, quality ash timber — with the favorable eight to 12 growth rings per inch — was harder to come by. Image In her job as the New Jersey Forest Service’s health specialist, Rosa Yoo inspects damage created by emerald ash borers at the Round Valley Recreation Area in Clinton Township. Credit... Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times Image The invasive ash borers create a carved-in pathway, known as a gallery, which is just below the surface of the bark of infected trees, wreaking havoc across North America. Credit... Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times In the state park in New Jersey, Yoo swung her hatchet into one of the dying ashes. She peeled back a section of bark the size of a pancake as if it were Velcro. “That’s not supposed to happen,” Yoo said. The emerald ash borer is the size of a grain of rice. But it swarms the forest, penetrating the protective bark of ash trees. It lays eggs in the cambium layer, on which the larvae eventually feed, cutting off the tree’s vital nutrients from the inside. Once satiated, the winged insects burst out of the tree and restart the cycle. Since the borers were first detected in the United States in 2002, in Michigan, efforts have been made to stop or slow their progress. But they have been spotted as far north as Winnipeg, Manitoba, and as far south as Texas. This summer, they were discovered in Oregon. More recently, Yoo has been assisting as the New Jersey Department of Agriculture attempts a biological control, releasing parasitoid wasps known to feed on emerald ash borer larvae. But it will take years for the predators to catch on in the numbers required to fight back against the borer, which is native to Asia and most likely hitched a ride to the United States on a container ship. Meanwhile, trees are dying. “Nature has a very resilient way of hanging in there,” Yoo said. “I believe there will still be ash, but it will be a long time before it can get back to where it was.” Bobby Hillerich, a fourth-generation bat maker for Hillerich & Bradsby, admitted the company was late to fully appreciate the impact. Louisville Slugger started in 1884 using ash and hickory, a heavier wood that fell out of favor by the 1940s. Image New Jersey hopes to combat the emerald ash borers by releasing parasitoid wasps to feed on the ash borer’s larvae. Credit... Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times For more than a century, Hillerich & Bradsby sourced its ash lumber from mills dotting Pennsylvania’s densely forested northern tier and across the southern New York border. The woods offered such abundance that 40,000 trees a year could be felled to make Louisville Sluggers, at a cost of just 90 cents per board foot. “We had this fantasy that it was going to be containable,” Hillerich said of the insect infestation. “It was probably a few years later that we came to realize this was not going the way we thought.” The company still makes 325,000 to 350,000 ash bats a year, Hillerich said, but they’re the low-end variety that customers might find at a local retailer. “They’re usually used for protection,” Hillerich said, “or for costumes for Halloween.” Regardless of the borer, Hillerich thinks maple would still have become the most popular wood wielded by major leaguers because of its firmness and consistency. But the demand for ash would have probably remained strong, he said, if bat makers could have maintained their supply. “We had to have some hard conversations with some guys,” Hillerich said. “We said we can’t be sure of the supply of ash we were getting. We just can’t guarantee it was the quality wood that they’ve been swinging.” Birch is another species that has gained a greater foothold in ash’s void. But it has its faults, too. “Players don’t like the sound,” Hillerich said. Image There is hope that if the current crop of emerald ash borers is killed off that the next generation of white ash trees will be able to thrive. Credit... Michelle Gustafson for The New York Times Jason Grabosky, the director of the Rutgers Urban Forestry Program, retains more optimism than most about the future of North America’s ash trees. Because they are capable of shedding seeds in large quantities, a new generation of ash trees might yet take root after the borer has laid waste to the old. For baseball, however, it is the end of an era. “It will probably be at least a generation before we see ash bats come back,” Grabosky said. “But if we have children playing baseball, I imagine we will still want ash bats.” Advertisement .