When someone is asked whether or not they watch baseball, they most likely give one of two answers. They probably either say “yes”, or “no, it is too boring”. Many baseball-purists would cringe at such a remark but over time this point of view has become more and more popular. Is it true? Is the MLB too boring to watch nowadays? If your answer to that question is based on how many runs are being scored per game in recent years, your answer may just be correct.

In the last five years, the MLB has experienced many changes. There are more hard throwers coming through the ranks now than ever before, there has been a complete ban on performance enhancing drugs, and there is more shifting happening against teams. As pitching and defenses continue to evolve, batting has yet to have many advances in the last decade. This means that over the years, the odds have been stacked more and more against the hitter. This can be proven by the average amount of runs being scored per game. In 2014, the average amount of runs scored per game was 4.07. However, in 1925, the MLB hitters scored an average of 5.13 runs per game. Yes, this is just two years but if one were to make a scatterplot showing the year versus average runs scored per game, it would be easy to see the negative correlation. In order to make the game more interesting, maybe the MLB needs to figure out a solution to raise this statistic that continues to fall year after year.

When thinking of ways to raise this average runs per game statistic, a few ideas come to mind. The MLB could allow performance-enhancing drugs, but that probably is not in the best interest of the league. They could not allow teams to shift to a certain degree, but passing such a rule could result in strike from the teams and players. Or maybe the MLB can simply switch what kind of bat they allow the players to use.

As of now, the MLB only allows the players to use wooden bats. By switching to aluminum bats, the batted ball speed (the speed at which a baseball leaves a player’s bat after being contacted) would increase dramatically. This would lead to harder hit balls, which would result in more home runs, which would in turn result in more runs being scored per game.

Aluminum bats have been proven to outperform wooden bats in almost every testable area of a bat. Some of these areas that can be tested are bat speed, bat “sweet spot” size, and even bat compression.

To start, aluminum bats are hollow, while wooden bats are not. This allows for aluminum bats to have a center of mass closer to the barrel than that of wooden bats. The closer the center of mass is to the barrel, the lower moment of inertia the bat will possess, and thus be able to be swung faster. The faster a bat can be swung, the faster the batted ball speed will be. To put into simpler terms, if a batter is strong enough to swing a 26-ounce bat, he or she will be able to swing an aluminum version of that bat faster than a wooden version of that exact sized bat.

To continue, there has been no proof that the claim of aluminum bats having wider “sweet spots” is true. However, in Crisco and Greenwald’s study, they did find metal bats had a higher batted ball speed when the ball hit the aluminum bat outside of the “sweet spot” versus that of wooden bats. That can be shown by this graph here.

Finally, aluminum bats seem to have an elasticity property to them. When a ball contacts a wooden bat, the bat can compress up to half its original diameter, which can make the ball lose up to 75% of its initial energy. With aluminum bats, they have a “trampoline effect” and do not compress nearly as much. This means the amount of energy returned to the ball after it has been contacted is much greater in aluminum bats than in wooden bats. This phenomenon can allow for batted ball speeds 5 to 7 mph faster on average with aluminum bats versus wooden bats.

To conclude, this study produced by Crisco and Greenwald may not be conclusive in saying aluminum bats are definitely better than wooden bats, but it sure does make some eye opening discoveries. The other thing to keep in mind is that an increase in batted ball speed would lead to more runs scored, but it would also put the pitchers at a much higher risk of injury. It is reasonable to conclude that a pitcher would have a much higher chance of being severely injured if the hitter was using an aluminum bat instead of a wooden one. So should the MLB try to make the game more exciting? If you believe that answer is “Yes”, more conclusive evidence would have to be found for the MLB to ever consider switching bats. Maybe an experiment could be set up where a player had to switch what type of bat they used every other at bat over the course of an entire season. This would be a matched pairs design where factors such as bat size, weight, and player differences would all be controlled for. At the end of the season, statistics could be run measuring variables such as RBI’s, Hits, and Home Runs for each type of bat used.