Fans got their first look at the 2011 Vanderbilt baseball team last weekend during the three-game Black & Gold Series that annually concludes the team’s fall practice schedule.
But after the NCAA’s decision to make a significant rule change for the upcoming season, what may have surprised fans more than the first look was the first listen.
On August 8, the NCAA announced that bats used in its baseball games would be subject to a new performance standard — called the Ball-Bat Coefficient of Restitution, or BBCOR — effective Jan. 1, 2011. The BBCOR formula, according to a memorandum sent by the NCAA Baseball Rules Committee to each baseball program in the country on Aug. 17, “Provides a better measure of the bat’s performance and therefore allows the rules committee and bat testing laboratories to better predict field performance based on lab tests. The goal is that non-wood bats that meet this new standard will perform similarly to wood bats.”
For the more sentimental spectators, most noticeably absent from college baseball games this year will be the familiar “ping” sound of bat meeting ball, a sound that has now all but yielded completely to the “crack” of the wood bats of the major leagues. But for many fans, players and coaches, including Vanderbilt Head Coach Tim Corbin, the most notable change could end up being an expected downturn in offensive numbers from the new scoring-unfriendly bats.
“It’s like a wood bat,” Corbin said. “It’s going to slow down the game a little bit. I don’t have a big problem with them. I’ve felt all along that if you can swing a wood bat you can play at a high level, and I just don’t think that what we were playing with before was a bat that gave the game a lot of integrity.”
According to Greg Johnson of The NCAA News, the change was made in reaction to rising runs per game and home runs per game averages over the past few years throughout the nation.
Out of the Southeastern Conference’s 12 teams, only Georgia hit fewer home runs than Corbin’s team last year — the Commodores finished with 63 in 66 games, good for 80th nationally. Vanderbilt’s top-20 finishes in both ERA and fielding percentage made up for the power outage, propelling the Commodores to a 46-20 record and a Super Regional appearance against Florida State.
Corbin noted that the new bats could in turn produce some head-turning stat lines from pitchers around the nation.
“A guy with average stuff is going to have a chance to go longer in games,” he said. “Really you just have to throw strikes, because if you’re not throwing strikes to these bats and getting contact, then shame on you. That’s what it is — the ball’s not going to leave.”
Junior third baseman Jason Esposito, who supplied 12 of the team’s 63 home runs in 2010, trusted his teammates’ collective ability to adjust to the bats with, as he described it, “a little less pop.”
“As far as getting used to them, that’s what we’re doing right now,” Esposito said after the second game of the Black & Gold Series. “It’s a little bit of a difference from last year but not too much. You still have to square it up, still have to hit it, still have to find grass and avoid fielders. That’s all we’re really thinking about the bats right now.”
Junior Aaron Westlake, who led the team with 14 home runs last season, backed up Esposito’s remarks two days later by hitting three home runs in the series’ third game on Sunday. Fellow junior Joe Loftus added one of his own in the 5-3 Gold Team victory.
So if the last public scrimmage of fall practice is any indication, the long ball in college baseball is far from a thing of the past, at least for a Vanderbilt team that viewed it as a mere luxury on its way to a postseason run last year.
