Eighty (80) Home Runs in Five Days

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Prince George Citizen

Home runs stealing thunder at nationals

by SCOTT STANFIELD Prince George This Week
The outfield fences are not any closer to home base than they were 30 years ago. If anything, a home run should be more difficult to come by, since the fence is 10 feet high, as opposed to eight feet in days gone by.

Yet there have been somewhere in the neighbourhood of 80 home runs hit after the first five days at the 2006 Canadian senior men’s fastpitch championship at Spruce City Stadium.

What’s with the outrageous number of King Kong blasts at this year’s nationals? Are the batters that much bigger and stronger than those of yesteryear? Not likely.

The answer can be found in the shaft of an aluminum bat.

“You hate to compare the old days, but here, you would get 20 home runs in a season going out of this ball park,” said Grant Williams, who spent many years playing and coaching fastball in Prince George. “I don’t think the pitching was any better in those days than it is today. In fact, it may not be as good. Have hitters made a quantum leap in the last 10 years? I don’t think so. It’s all to do with the equipment. I think a home run shouldn’t be something that’s cheap, it has to be earned.

“There’s two problems, I think,” Williams added. “One is they’ve taken away the integrity of the game with so many home runs, and then, secondly, there’s a safety issue. You can move the fences back and lessen the impact of the long ball, but somehow you have to lessen the impact on the infielders and the pitchers. The ball comes off that bat like a rocket and it’s unsafe. I think they really have to look at something, and I hope it’s not a financial issue where they’re committed to staying with these composite bats because of the funding that they’re getting from manufacturers. They need to put the integrity and the safety of the players first priority, and that means going back to wood bats.”

Williams said pitchers are particularly at risk since they are off-balance and only 40 feet away from batters after throwing the ball.

“He doesn’t have time to get set to protect himself,” he said. “You look at baseball in this province and a lot of the colleges in the United States, they’ve banned the aluminum bats and gone to wood. Two reasons. One is safety issues, and number two was professional hitters have to use wooden bats. College players need to make that adjustment. There’s been quite a few college players that have been very successful with aluminum bats and haven’t been able to make the transition to wood. The professional leagues certainly would like to see everybody use wooden bats.”

Dave Koch, a coach of the Prince George Black Bears, would like to see the outfield fence moved back a few feet to the 250-foot mark.

“It (home run situation) is a combination of the bats and it is a combination of the ball,” Koch said. “Jeff (Hill) tried to get wooden bats for our league final here because there is an experimental league where they use (wood) bats, and I guess it worked out OK.”

When he hits the field, Koch usually catches or plays in the line of fire at third base.

“When you’ve got guys like Evan Potskin (of the Black Bears) who come up and turn on a ball, or Randy and Lance Potskin, when they can turn on a ball and it’s coming, anything that’s going to help slow it down a bit, using a wooden bat, that’s fine. I ain’t gonna complain.

“It’s something they keep talking about. They realize it. There’s something like 40 or 50 different bats that are illegal right now because there’s too much pop in them. It’s gotten to the point where they can’t even keep track of what bats are legal and what aren’t anymore. Going back to wooden bats wouldn’t bother me – kind of interesting. For years, the hardball men’s used the aluminum bats, then they went back to those wooden bats about five years ago. Back to the real game wouldn’t hurt.”

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 2nd, 2006 at 8:02 am and is filed under Canada. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.