Why do Baseball Bats Break?

Oh, hey, Grady. Good to see you.

In this video - about why major league baseball saw a sharp uptick in broken bats (and subsequently an uptick of injuries caused by flying bat shards) in the early and mid-2000's - Grady gets into the differences in ash (the wood used to make almost every pre-2000 bat) and maple (a wood that became popular - not poplar - with ball players in the early 2000's after Barry Bonds used one to break the HR record).

He then goes into the non-isotropic nature of wood and how ash and maple are very different. I guess the lessons learned in making ash bats didn't translate cleanly into making maple bats. It doesn't mean that maple bats are inherently less safe, just that they need to be made - and particularly marked - differently than do ash bats.

Really, changing the material requires changing the production and use strategies for that object?

Who would've guessed it?