Wouldn’t You Know, It’s Hard to Switch From Aluminum?

It took a few broken bats for Joe Mathis to learn his lesson.

Drafted out of high school by the Seattle Mariners, Mathis figured he could switch from aluminum to wood without changing his habits at the plate.

“I found out the hard way,” he said. “In high school, you’d get jammed by a pitch and you still could hit it out of the park. In the pros, you get jammed and you end up with a splinter in your hands.”

Not all young players find the adjustment to wood a confidence-shattering experience. But at Lancaster, where Mathis plays for the Class-A JetHawks, Manager Rick Burleson has seen plenty of minor league prospects struggle with meager batting averages.

“It sometimes takes a guy out of college a couple of years to learn how to swing,” Burleson said.

Because aluminum is so light, he said, it can lull hitters into leading with the knob of the bat and bringing the barrel over the plate at the last moment.

And because aluminum bats have fat barrels with elongated sweet spots, players get used to hitting pitches off their hands or off the end of the bat.

“With aluminum, you just free-wheel. There’s no discipline,” Burleson said. “Guys who make it [in professional baseball] realize ‘Hey, I can’t swing at everything.’ ”

They also learn that good technique is vital.

“That’s what scouts are for,” said James Clifford, the JetHawk designated hitter. “They know who’s got an aluminum-bat swing and who has a good swing.”

Some prospects arrive in the minors wise to the ways of wood. They have taken hundreds of cuts at batting practice with wooden bats in college or played in summer leagues that use them to gain experience.

“College players aren’t fools,” Clifford said. “We know what’s going on.”

Still, there are players such as Mathis who spend their formative years swinging only aluminum. It has taken the swift outfielder five years to raise his average to .298, five years of swinging that odd, brown stuff.

“To be honest,” Mathis said, “I’m still not used to it.”