While aluminum bats are cheaper to use and are safer for young children, wood bats are more authentic and are safer for elite players.
If you're in the market for a baseball bat yourself, it's probably because you or your child plays in an organized amateur league. The league probably issues specifications for the (almost certainly aluminum) bats, and it would seem easy enough to buy a bat that feels right and meets the qualifications. But before you buy, take some time to educate yourself on the differences between wood and aluminum bats.
For much of baseball's history, only wooden bats were available. That changed in 1970 when the aluminum bat was introduced. It was quickly adopted by Little League baseball, both to save money and to make the players safer, and other amateur leagues followed suit. Wood bats tend to break in pieces, creating sharp projectiles during the game and, of course, requiring that the bat be replaced. Today, aluminum bats are used by Little League baseball as well as most other amateur leagues and at all levels of softball play.
In recent years, however, there has been a growing movement to restore the use of wood bats at the college and even high school levels. Purists want wood for what you might call purely aesthetic reasons, but perplexingly enough, given that aluminum bats were adopted partly for safety reasons, many parents and experts have come to believe that it's aluminum bats that are dangerous. The safety trade-off when you eliminate the hazard of broken bats is that balls pitched at a high speed are batted back much faster with aluminum bats. For preadolescent children, aluminum bats seem to be safer, but in elite amateur play, the concern is that aluminum bats might increase the risk of injury or death for the pitcher, who may not have sufficient time to react if a ball is batted directly at him using an aluminum bat. While the NCAA tests the aluminum bats used by its players and limits the exit speed, or the speed at which a bat can return a pitched ball, some observers feel that the allowed speed- which is not faster than a wood bat can hit the same pitch- is too high. Another concern is that the simulated pitches used in testing are noticeably slower than the fastballs of college pitchers, and even some high school pitchers. This difference would mean that the exit speed observed in the testing laboratory will be greatly exceeded on the field.
With the evidence pointing to wooden bats as safer, cost is the barrier to their wider use by amateurs; the use of wood bats, because of their breakage rate, is much more expensive than the use of aluminum bats. Even proponents of a switch to wood bats at the college level generally limit the demand to the higher-performing Division I teams, where the pitches are thrown and the bats swung faster.
Where does this leave you, as a consumer? It depends upon what you want the bat for. If that bat is for a child under high school age, aluminum is more cost-effective and probably safer. The bat will have a higher initial cost, but greater durability; it can be passed on to another child when it is outgrown. But if you or your child plays baseball at an elite level with fast pitching and the league, like most amateur leagues, uses aluminum bats, give serious consideration to whether you should become involved with the movement for the use of wood bats. Wood bats would increase the cost of the game, it's true. While no pitcher has been killed during an NCAA game, players as young as 14 have been killed or permanently injured by balls batted from aluminum bats. The use of wood bats might have saved their lives, and many parents and activists feel that cost cannot be prioritized over safety. In addition to giving young players a more authentic baseball experience and helping them develop the skills needed at the professional level, using wood bats instead of aluminum bats could save lives.
