Breaking bats: Hitters hate it, pitchers love it, and the Pirates are good at it -

Frank Duncan never made it to the big leagues with the Pirates, but his bat did — for a little while, at least.

One day last season, as Colin Moran picked through the odds and ends stashed in the bat room at PNC Park, he spotted a Sam bat 2K1 model, 33 inches long and 30 ounces.

“I picked it up and it just felt good,” Moran said. He glanced at the name on the barrel and furrowed his eyebrows. If the bat belonged to a teammate, Moran would ask permission before swinging it in a game or even in the cage. He didn’t recognize the name seared into this bat, though. “The guy’s name was Frank Duncan,” Moran said.

Duncan was the Pirates’ 13th-round draft pick in 2014. A few days before spring training began in 2017, the right-hander was traded to the Arizona Diamondbacks. He never made it to the majors and this summer pitched in an independent league.

“I didn’t know him. I never played with him,” said Moran, who joined the Pirates in 2018. “I picked up the bat and I pinch-hit a homer with it, so I rode it out for a little while. It was a good one.”

Duncan’s legacy in the big leagues didn’t last forever. A few weeks later, Moran heard a distinctive snap when he made contact. He knew right away it was time to move on to another bat.

“They’re made of wood,” Moran said with a shrug. “They break.”

The collision of ball and bat lasts only about 0.7 milliseconds, but it can generate up to 8,000 pounds of force. Hit the ball on the sweet spot, and good thing can happen. Miss-hit it someplace else, especially if contact is made down toward the narrow handle, and the wood will vibrate, bend and, sometimes, fracture.

MLB keeps detailed statistics on how many bats break over the course of each season. The commissioner’s office declined to share its data, but sources told The Athletic the Pirates have tended in recent years to break their bats more often than the league average.

“The good news,” manager Clint Hurdle said with a grin, “is we’ve got plenty of bats.”

The team’s most prolific bat-snappers this season are Moran and Starling Marté.

“It’s just the swing,” Marté said through interpreter Mike González. “Sometimes, you hit it off the end and the bat breaks. Sometimes you get jammed. We can’t control that. We just see the ball and swing the bat. Sometimes, you get it good. Sometimes, you make a good swing and it still breaks.”

Marté uses a 30-ounce, 32 1/2-inch bat and has contracts with three companies — Dinger, Tater and Rawlings. Do the bat-makers ever complain that he’s destroying too much of their product? Marte shrugged.

“The more bats they make and send to me, the more money they get,’ Marte said with a laugh. “They like when people order a lot of bats, so I think they’re happy I’ve been breaking a lot of them.”

The type of wood and its density factor into how long a bat might last before it snaps. Birch and ash generally are more durable than maple, but maple tends to propel balls farther. Barry Bonds began swinging maple in 1997, which helped trigger a stampede of new maple bat users.

Around the same time, the number of broken-bat incidents began to increase. Over the final three months of the 2008 season, there were 2,232 broken bats, including 756 that burst into multiple pieces. In 2010, Tyler Colvin of the Chicago Cubs was hospitalized after being impaled by a flying shard.

MLB formed a group of experts to study the shattering-bat problem, then ramped up its testing and quality-control enforcement. MLB now insists that the maple bats of every player who signed after 2012 must be made of high-density wood, which is less likely to shatter. PFS TECO, a Wisconsin-based research and inspection company, monitors the bats.

“The testing and standards are pretty rigorous,” Pirates equipment manager Scott “Bones” Bonnett said. “TECO comes down to spring training and checks out every one of the bats in our rack. I remember in the first first year, maybe 16 of our bats were (rejected). Sixteen bats is a lot of money. This past year, I don’t think we had any. That means the bat companies are doing their job, which is better for us.”

Bats are safer now — it’s rare to see one explode and send dangerous shards helicoptering all over the field — but they still break.

“Sometimes when the pitcher makes a good pitch — jam you with a cutter, a sinker at the hands, a fastball in — and you’re late, there’s nothing you can do,” Gregory Polanco said. “I bet every pitcher loves doing it.”

Polanco is spot on.

“I love breaking bats,” right-hander Joe Musgrove said. “Jam-shot broken bats are always better. Off-the-cap is OK too — it’s still a broken bat. But when you beat someone inside bad enough for them to swing and snap their bat, that’s a great feeling as a pitcher.”

When Musgrove pitched for the Tri-City ValleyCats of the Low-A New York-Penn League, he and his teammate competed to see who could break the most bats. “The winner got a free haircut or something,” Musgrove laughed. “It was fun, a good little competition.” Musgrove was the team champ in 2014, edging lefty Bryan Radziewski by four broken bats.

Three years later, Musgrove was in the majors with the Houston Astros. In the fist inning of a game against the Los Angeles Angels, Musgrove sawed off Albert Pujols with an up-and-in fastball.

“It snapped his bat pretty bad,” Musgrove said. “He hit a soft, little flare right back to me and I caught it.”

Four innings later, Musgrove tried to pull the same trick with an inside fastball. Pujols mashed a three-run homer.

“He’d been setting me up the whole day, waiting for me to come back in,” Musgrove said. “I learned the lesson quick that sometimes you can only break a bat once because that’s the last time you’ll get up in there.”

Every few days during the season, Bonnett goes around the clubhouse to take bat inventory. If a player is low, Bonnett will contact the bat manufacturer and ask for more. After working for 20 seasons in the Pirates’ clubhouse, Bonnett knows which players require more frequent check-ins. One such guy was 2013 National League MVP Andrew McCutchen.

“Cutch used to snap bats constantly, even on good hits,” Bonnett said. “It wasn’t like he was breaking them on outs. His (breaks) were almost in the exact same spot every time, whether he hit it on the barrel or the handle. It was unbelievable.”

Most position players have a couple dozen of their personal bats, plus whatever is lying around in the bat room, from which to choose during home games. For a road trip, each player packs a case that holds 10 bats. For guys who use several different models, Bonnett tosses extras in the bat bags.

For most players, a single case will suffice for even a three-city road trip. If they somehow break more than that, the equipment crew can arrange for reinforcements via express delivery. Teammates often offer up one of theirs as a replacement.

“If you break your bat, take one of mine. I don’t care,” said Steven Brault, whose .236/.257/.278 career slash line qualifies him as a pitcher who rakes. “But if you break my bat, I’ll be very sad.”

Sometimes, the player doesn’t realize that he’s broken his bat.

“When we break a bat, we don’t see it again,” Marte said. “The bat boy takes it. Sometimes after a game, I ask Bones, ‘Hey, where’s my bat?’ ”

After the bat boy takes the bat to the dugout, it’s sent to an MLB authenticator, who logs it and affixes a small sticker to verify it’s a game-used item. If the bat has some historical significance, MLB or the Hall of Fame might take it. That’s what happened in May 2012 when Josh Harrison snapped his bat when he singled in the ninth inning to break up Justin Verlander’s bid for a no-hitter.

“I got an email right away, ‘Don’t give away that bat. Somebody wants it,’” Bonnett said.

Usually, the wounded bat winds up in a back room at PNC Park. Many of them are donated to Pirates Charities to be sold or auctioned. Once in a while, a player wants to keep it.

“I’ve not broken a single bat yet in pro ball. Maybe that’s because I don’t swing hard enough,” Brault said with a sly smile. “But if I do, I’ll definitely want to keep it. Put it on my wall at home.”

Occasionally, Bonnett will get a few broken bats autographed, then hand them out to random kids at the ballpark.

“After that, they’re out of my hands,” Bonnett said. “I just order more.”

(Photo: Ezra Shaw / Getty Images)

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