WILL THE AXE FALL?

Baseball has been steeped in history. It is that the game has fundamentally NOT changed is why the game continues to survive.

Nothing is more true than with the layout of the diamond dimensions. Nothing is as true as the shape and construction of a baseball, its seams and its skin. And the baseball bat, a simple rounded stick of wood.

Until now.

Jeff Passon of Yahoo Sports reports that the simple bat handle is about change.

The man who may help create the change is Red Sox infielder Dustin Pedroia. He is the only major leaguer currently using a bat that has an axe handle. Pedroia has spent a month using it as his lone bat, and the results are promising: Over the 28 games since he switched, he is hitting .353/.386/.504. His 42 hits over the past month are tied for the fourth most in baseball.

Now, unless you were a boy scout or a mountain logger, most kids today have no idea what an axe is or what is its purpose. The flattened wood frame is put through a heavy metal cutting tool to create a powerful yet top heavy tree cutter and wood splitter. This long used axe shape seems to have developed to maximize the power of the arm through the hands (palm).
 

"I think it's only a matter of time before the axe-shaped handle is the standard," said Hugh Tompkins, the director of research and development for Baden Sports, a Seattle-area company that created the Axe Bat, which this year received permission from Major League Baseball for in-game use. "The round-handled bat will be like a rotary telephone."

The Axe Bat replaces the knob with an oval-shaped handle that tapers into a curved, angled bottom. The Axe bat that grew out of a simple question: Why does the knob – the one piece of the bat known to hurt players, particularly those who grip it on the lower edge of the palm and put their hamate bones in danger – still exist when it imperils those it's supposed to help?

The current shape of most bats with the knob at the bottom is to keep the lower hand on the bat during the swing motion. If the knob was not at the bottom, the bat could be fly out of the players' hands. Even the Axe bat has a contoured bottom to keep the hand from slipping off.

Can a flatter hand surface help create more power and stability of a batter than a round bat?  There is not enough statistical evidence to draw any conclusion. But it is an interesting innovation.