How to hit with maple bats.
Research has found Sugar Maple t
o be 10% harder, stiffer, and stronger than White Ash. Recent changes increased its safety factor in reference to maple bat breakage. Those changes include enhancing the initial selection process, and rotating the hitting surface of the wooden maple bats (the grain of the wood) by 90 degrees. In doing so, the contact point for a maple bat is the face grain instead of the edge grain. It has been suggested that the new orientation is a much stronger position, proper for this sugar maple species. Players are still instructed to swing a wooden baseball bat with the label up. We now put our logo on the edge gain of our new manufactured maple bats. Please remember to always make contact with your maple bat on the face grain (label up), it will make your bat less likely to break. Hitting on the face grain is the more natural, and less detrimental/stress way of making contact with maple bats. Since this change has been implemented in the MLB, maple bats breaking have gone down considerably. If you want to find out more, read our Maple bats vs. Ash bats page on our online store at www.annexbaseball.com.
Thanks for this information. I have wondered why the maple bats we stock do not have the trademark in the right place. Apparently, it IS in he right place but just a different right place. Now I can explain this to my customers and describe why it is different that using an ash bat.
No problem Bob, Manufacturers can still put the label on either side if they want, but for MLB games the label must be on the more proper side which is the edge grain. Just remember when you are at the plate to hit the ball on the face grain. Check out our newest blog post of our Top 10 Baseball Facts! Pretty Cool.
Will hitting it with the face grain give it less “pop”
Hi David, hitting with the face grain will not make the bat have less pop. The sweet spot is still the same between the two nodes. So when you are up at the plate with a maple bat, just remember to have the face grain pointing towards the pitcher. This should help prevent some breaks.
Matt
The bat I purchased today is a maple bat with its label on the face grain. Unfortunately there are trademarks and type of bat and stuff printed in the face grain. Does this weaken the bat if I hit the maple “correctly” at the face grain with all this stuff in the wood?
best wishes from germany!
Hi, It shouldn’t be a problem. Just make sure you hit it on the label side than, or the face grain side with nothing on it. Thank you for the question!
Do you have further articles like this 1 called, How To Hit With Maple Bats – Annex Baseball Blog?
I actually want to read through even much more regarding it.
Thanks for your time.
At this time this is the only article we have written on this subject. Thank you for reading!