NCAA looks to weed out illegal softball bats

Perhaps it started with the walk-off home run by Jenna Rodriguez a year ago that sent upstart Hawaii to the Women's College World Series and ended the season for the University of Alabama, the top-seeded team in the national championship tournament.

Or maybe the tipping point was those seven home runs UCLA hit in two games to sweep of Arizona at last summer's national title series.

At some point in the 2010 college softball season, bats became an issue. Going into the season, only seven teams had ever hit 100 or more home runs in a year. By the final pitch, no fewer than six teams had joined that list.

Hawaii shattered the national home run record with 158, topping the previous high mark by 24.

To address the situation, the NCAA instituted postseason bat testing for 2011. Unlike in the past, when a couple of bats from each of the eight teams that made it to the World Series were collected for testing, bats will now be tested and certified before competition.

At issue is an exit speed rating of 98 mph, the maximum allowed. Testing in the past has shown an alarming number of bats have exceeded that standard.

"I can tell you that in the last three years, more than 40 percent of the bats (from the World Series) that we've tested in the lab have come back too high," said Dee Abrahamson, secretary-rules editor of the NCAA Softball Rules Committee. "Those are all our best teams in the country and we're coming up with more than 40 percent that have exceeded the standard.

"That's a staggeringly high number. The goal is zero."

With advances in bat technology, home run production across NCAA Division I softball has doubled in the last 10 years, hitting an all-time high at .64 home runs per game last season. To those who have watched the numbers grow over the years since the introduction of composite bats, nothing less than the integrity of the game is at stake.

"Those teams that had 130 and 140 home runs last year, that's not much different than Barry Bonds taking steroids," said Tennessee coach Ralph Weekly.

Rainbow homers

The poster children for the home run explosion are the Hawaii Wahine, who homered their way to the World Series while using an outdated, 2005-model Easton Stealth bat. Since composite bats - made of carbon fibers instead of alloys like aluminum - hit balls harder and farther as they break in with more use, those bats had aged like a bottle of fine Pinot noir wine.

"It was just too old," Alabama coach Patrick Murphy said of the bat model Hawaii used. "The more you used it, the hotter it got."

Abrahamson can't reveal exactly which bats failed inspection after last year's World Series, but the numbers tell the story. Hawaii hit 62 home runs in 2009, before switching to the Easton model, then hit nearly 100 more last season. This year, with the 2005 Easton Stealth not approved for use, the Wahine hit all of 56 home runs.

"That bat model was never banned, what they used, but that model is not on the (approved) list anymore because the manufacturer has taken it off the list" Abrahamson said. "You might surmise they didn't put it on (the list) because it won't pass."

To the rescue

Calls for measures to keep hot bats from taking over the game reached a crescendo in the offseason, and the Southeastern Conference stepped up to mandate pregame testing in league play.

"We've tested every series and it's worked out well," said Florida coach Tim Walton. "For those that were skeptics of how bat testing works, I think the league stepped in and the coaches stepped in and set the precedent for the country that all coaches, all teams and all players understand what is legal."

There are two models of bat testing machines, each costing about $750, which use barrel compression to measure whether a bat meets the approved testing exit speed standard of 98 mph or below. The machine produced by Easton looks like an electronic vice, with a hole to fit the bat barrel and both red (fail) and green (pass) metallic cylinders for testing. If a bat passes, the machine makes no noise. If it fails, the machine beeps an alarm.

Each bat is tested, rotated 90 degrees, then tested again.

The process of testing a team's supply of bats takes just a couple of minutes.

"It's pretty cut and dried," Murphy said. "You bring your bats up to the table, put them on the machine, test your 10 bats and then the opposing team tests their 10 bats. If it's above 98 mph, it doesn't pass. If it's 98 or below, it passes."

When a bat passes for a series, a sticker with the opposing team's logo is attached so everyone knows it has been tested. If it fails, it is collected and sent along for secondary compression testing and, if it fails again, laboratory testing.

The data

The impact of bat testing in the SEC hasn't halted the deluge of home runs, but has slowed it a bit. In 2010, SEC teams hit 245 home runs in 296 regular-season conference games, an average of about .83 home runs per game. In 2011, the first year of testing, league teams hit 238 homers in 294 regular-season SEC games, about .81 per game.

Over the course of the current season, "less than 25 bats" failed testing, said Laronica Conway, assistant SEC commissioner.

Alabama had one bat fail, a bat that had passed up until that point of the season. With composite bats that get hotter with use, bats can pass the legal threshold over the course of a game or a weekend.

"It might have gotten hot during the week and you just didn't know it," Murphy said. "This system is working, where if it is too hot you're going to know it before the series and you won't be able to use it.

"That's what we wanted. You know that one team isn't winning because of equipment."

Other conferences, including the Big 12, considered doing testing this season but had to hold off due to a shortage of testing machines. Since the machines hadn't been in wide use, there weren't many in supply. Schools that tried to order after mid-January weren't able to get them in time.

"It's not a real saleable item," Abrahamson said. "It's not something that you want to make 500 and hope to sell them."

The NCAA also did some testing at early-season tournaments. Abrahamson said about 2,600 bats were tested with some 25 failing. Those were sent for lab testing. Another 25 or so failed due to cracks or other flaws that disqualified them from use.

There is also anecdotal evidence. Easton pulled its SRV5B Synergy bat, a model used by some Florida players, from the approved list in late April. Florida hit almost two home runs per game up to that point, including 17 in the final six games before it was removed from the list, and hit only nine in eight games without the blue-and-gray model.

Hawaii coach Bob Coolen has an eye for high-performance bats. He received a shipment of the Synergy model from Easton just before it was removed from play.

"The ball just jumped off the bat," Coolen said. "I told my assistant this bat isn't going to last a month, and it didn't last a week."

Dirty work afoot?

The dirty little secret that was uncovered by testing of bats used at the Women's College World Series is that something more sinister may be at work than just bats increasing performance by the normal breaking-in process.

According to Abrahamson, two bats used at the 2010 World Series tested at exit speeds in excess of 104 mph, with a top-end speed of 104.7. Lloyd Smith, associate engineering professor at Washington State, tests bats, including those used in collegiate softball. It is his opinion that a bat performing at such a high exit speed indicates a strong possibility of deliberate alteration.

"I would say that it is unlikely that could happen without tampering," he said. "I wouldn't send somebody to jail that had a bat like that in his hand, but I would certainly say it warrants suspicion."

Bats can be shaved - a process that involves removing the end cap and thinning the inner walls to allow a greater trampoline effect on the ball - or rolled, which involves placing the bat between two rollers to stretch the fibers.

"I've heard of it but I've never seen it," Murphy said. "Rumors are out there, but I've never seen anybody do it."

Higher purpose

Bat testing is designed to level the playing field, not lower it, but lower scoring may be a long-term side effect.

"I don't think any of us wanted the 21-14 championship game, or the 15-9 like (UCLA-Arizona) last year," Murphy said. "We do want excitement, we do want home runs, but I don't think that's anybody's ideal softball game."

The ideal, Abrahamson said, is fairness.

"It's primarily an integrity issue of the game, a fairness issue," she said. "I think there's a place in the game for home run hitters, but it shouldn't be everybody.

"If a good pitcher makes a good pitch to an average player, that player shouldn't be able to hit it out of the park."

Reach Tommy Deas at tommy.deas@tuscaloosanews.com or at 205-722-0224.