Great bat debate rages on

Seeing his teenage son crumpled in a coma Bjorn Sandberg did the only thing a father should do. Or could do. I'd probably do the same thing, too. Any father would. All that grief, anger, shock, has to go somewhere. Something positive needs to follow something so negative, if for no other reason than to provide stability within the family.

So Sandberg wants aluminum bats banned. Bring wood back. Make baseball safer. His son, Gunnar, a pitcher for Marin Catholic High School, is now in an induced coma. Pitching against De La Salle on March 11, Gunnar was struck in the head by a ball propelled by an aluminum bat. To those who witnessed it, the scene was horrific. The scene is always horrific, when a pitcher is struck by a batted ball. There are no love taps when a hard object hits your face at 110 miles an hour.

So the outrage is strong in Marin right now as one would expect. Obviously a change must occur. How could it not?

Well, a change did occur last September in the Boston suburb of Wellesley and the suffering people in Marin are not going to be happy reading about it, as one would expect.

Officials of the Wellesley Little League decided to abandon wooden bats and return to metal bats. Wellesley had been using wood for the last eight years after a pitcher for Wellesley High School suffered a severe head injury as the result of being hit by a batted ball off an aluminum bat. The player suffered a severed artery. A blood clot formed. The player eventually recovered but stopped playing baseball.

Eight years later Wellesley officials returned to aluminum after learning from specialists that neither type of bat is safer than the other, league safety commissioner Patrick Doyle told the Boston Globe. Doyle cited a 2007 report from Little League International that found the speed at which a ball leaves a metal versus wood bat after contact is roughly the same.

The Wellesley decision, of course, will not end the debate that has been going on for almost 40 years. Ever since aluminum bats gained popularity in the early '70s the topic has been sliced, diced and consumed at a feverish pace. The reason? A game of nuance abruptly comes to a halt with the sound and the sight of a pitcher helplessly falling like a bag of wheat to the ground.

A motionless body on the ground is a logical result of football; we almost come to expect it, even to relish it, the sudden stoppage. The same, lifeless body in baseball is an ice water drip down the spine, a scene contradictory to all those before it. It is a singular moment seared into the memory of those present who witnessed it. And the mind always races to the most dreary of possibilities, that a life has been permanently altered, if not ended.

When Marin Catholic High School announced it was switching to wooden bats for the rest of the season after Gunnar Sandberg was felled, Mel Arnerich of the T&B Sports in Santa Rosa felt he needed to make a response.

"I wanted to acknowledge the situation on a human level," said Arnerich, an infielder in the Cleveland Indians minor league organization for three years and once the head baseball coach at Santa Rosa High for five years.

Arnerich himself doesn't feel the aluminum bat is any more dangerous than the wooden one. Still, a kid went down and Arnerich couldn't sit idly by.

"We sent the school wooden bats for their team," said Arnerich, 60.

Arnerich also is the same person who has been selling aluminum bats for the last 31 years at T&B and will continue to sell them.

"There's an inherent risk in any sport," Arnerich said.

Last weekend Arnerich was in San Luis Obispo, watching the Cal baseball team play Cal Poly. His son, Tony, a former minor leaguer himself, is the hitting coach for the Bears. During the game Cal pitcher Eric Johnson took a line shot to the head. It was a glancing blow, yet the ball stayed in the air long enough that the Bears shortstop almost caught it in short center field.

Did Arnerich have a moment of pause then about the danger of aluminum bats?

"Nope," he said.

In his 31 years at T&B Sports has Arnerich ever thought about not selling aluminum bats?

"Nope," he said again.

Arnerich isn't denying aluminum has changed the game. "It has, most definitely," he said. "And if non-professional baseball went back to wooden bats, I'd be delighted - because I'm a purist and I believe the game should be played with wood bats."

But more dangerous? Arnerich rather subscribes to the theory of random selection. That the well-tagged batted ball at a pitcher is frightening, damaging and potentially fatal, no matter what type of bat is used. Just as the liner that Gunnar Sandberg took, no one can say with certainty that it would have been any different if a wooden bat had delivered it. Doubt will always have to be acknowledged. Questions will always be raised.

Major League Baseball history is replete with pitchers who had their careers altered, if not terminated, by line drives from wooden bats. Herb Score and Dizzy Dean are two of the most dramatic examples. A third name, far less famous, offers the quintessential example.

Bo McLaughlin, a Oakland A's pitcher, took a liner to the face from the White Sox' Harold Baines in 1982. The sound at impact was like a watermelon being dropped. I could hear it all the way up in the press box at the Oakland Coliseum. I'll never forget that sound. I'll never forget McLaughlin vomiting blood on the field as he went into shock. His left cheekbone was shattered. His eye socket broken in five places.

McLaughlin come back that season without much success. He languished in the minors for three years and retired. One minute he was a reliable Major League middle reliever. One pitch later he was descending out of baseball.

Sure, one could say Bo McLaughlin suffered an isolated incident, for pitchers typically leave the game with the same functioning body parts as when they entered it.

But Bo wasn't buying the "isolated incident" explanation. How could he? And Bjorn Sandberg isn't consoling himself with his son's tragedy with the same explanation. This isn't an isolated incident for him. This is his son in a coma. This is his son having a portion of his skull removed to allow his brain to swell without being compressed.

And that's the damnable nature of it all.

Even if Bjorn Sandberg is right, that aluminum bats need to be banned, it still doesn't change that moment for his son.

For more on North Bay sports go to Bob Padecky's blog at padecky.blogs.pressdemocrat.com. You can reach Staff Columnist Bob Padecky at 521-5223 or bob.padecky@pressdemocrat.com.