Whoa! That was some good shit! Apparently I take 4/20 to be some sort of national fucking holiday or something, because I just fell off the face of the earth after that last post.
The truth is, I just ran out of motivation and creative juices. I am amazed that the whole blog mania still seems strong, and that some of us really do find time and energy to write something nearly every day. Unfortunately, I am not one of them, and may never be. So, when something moves me, I may write a little rant about it.
Today, I just can’t help myself, as I am overwhelmed (yet again,) by the over-zealous nature of politicians to legislate to “fix” a problem that doesn’t exist to appease a miniscule sector of our population in an effort to “appear” to be earning there fucking paychecks by making the public safer. What a crock of shit!
Case in point, the New York City council has successfully banned the use of metal bats by high-schools in the city of New York. And get this, for the sole reason that they “might” be more dangerous than wood bats. Even the federal judge upholding the injunction himself admitted in his ruling that zero empirical evidence exists to show that such bats are dangerous. What the fuck, over! These are elected officials making law for the sole purpose of making law. Spending literally hundreds of thousands of tax dollars to fight for this ban in the courts instead of wisely spending that money toward a study to find out if the original premise behind the idiocy is actually true! What a concept! So instead of spending $50,000 to have a totally impartial, un-biased group study the issue, we’ll spend (god, only knows, just input a grossly disgusting amount of money here,) to fight the bat industry in court, so in the end, the bat companies will spend the 50k on their own study that will spin the facts in just the right way so to prove once and for all that metal bats are no more dangerous than wood. This is the royal blue political machine hard at work.
Okay, as I have said many times before, I’m not a big fan of Jeff Passan of Yahoo! Sports, but he brings this issue to light and generally feels this is just as idiotic as I do, even if he doesn’t have even the minimal knowledge of bat performance, he does logically come to the conclusion that banning something solely on the perception that it “might” be dangerous is just plain stupid. What I can say, from many years of personal experience using high-performance metal (should read, man-made) bats, is that they are certainly better performing than any wood bat ever turned on a lathe. Hands down, they do hit the ball farther and with more velocity, and I don’t need a radar gun or chronometer to see this with my own eyes. But does that mean they are more dangerous than wood? The answer is still “maybe” and without studying this any further, I still hold the notion that creating law based on one incident is over-reactive at best and a down right misuse of power.
But, what prompted me to write this diatribe was not so much Jeff’s argument against banning metal bats based on conjecture and hyperbole, but in a single quote he wrote as his closing remark, and if true, makes the whole premise of this argument concerning high school bat safety completely laughable. Jeff quotes Dr. Crisco, of Brown University as saying, “If you're concerned about injury, what about cheerleading? It has 10 times more catastrophic injuries than baseball.” To which I say, no shit? We should ban it!
So, banning the use of metal bats will reduce the number of baseball related deaths in the five boroughs from one ever five years to one every six or even seven! Wow! All the while the number of deaths and quadriplegics from cheerleading accidents will remain at ten times that. Way to go guys! Way to go.
Oh, I ganja!
Subscribe