Lesson for hurling as baseball suffers from ash backlash
Apart from the miserable looking fans and the shivering motionless outfielders, one of the most obvious signs of the chill factor was the sudden spike in the amount of broken bats.
It seemed like during every game of last week’s gripping divisional series (effectively the second round of the play-offs and roughly equivalent to the quarter-final stage en route to the World Series), there was a jagged chunk of ash careening off in one direction or another.
Luckless New York Yankees relief pitcher Joba Chamberlain knows all about freak accidents. He nearly lost his foot when jumping on a trampoline with his young son just before the start of this season. Instead he lost most of his playing time for the second year in a row, returning recently and then exiting a crucial game last week when the barrel of Baltimore Orioles hitter Matt Wieters’ broken bat hit him straight in his pitching elbow as he turned to watch the ball sail over his head.
Like in hurling, ash is the tried and tested wood of choice for the top level of baseball. The majority of wood bats are made from northern white ash harvested in Pennsylvania and New York. White ash is used because of durability, strength and weight but there is also an element of flexibility — though not nearly as much as the bend in the hurley. Ash trees which are used to make baseball bats are often 50 years old and only the best 10% of the wood makes the cut.
There have always been efforts to look for alternatives. Maple baseball bats increased in popularity after San Francisco slugger Barry Bonds broke the home run season record a decade ago. Interestingly, according to USA Today, when Chamberlain was hit by that broken bat last week, the Orioles were forced to deny that a maple bat was the weapon of choice. Maple bats were a source of controversy in 2008 when Pittsburgh Pirates hitting coach Don Long and a fan at Dodger Stadium suffered serious injuries after being struck by pieces of broken maple bats.
There is aluminum too but not at the professional level while in the early days of baseball, hickory bats were common despite their weight. Only a big man like Babe Ruth could really get the most out of those ones.
All of which should go some way to explaining the misgivings in both sports about how prone the family of ash trees are to disease. When I read reports that the chalara fraxinea fungus had reached Ireland — since denied by Agriculture Minister Simon Coveney — it reminded me of a conversation I had with Stephen Quigley in January.
Quigley runs the American Hurling Company in Greenville, South Carolina. He moved his company there from Indiana after the Emerald Ash Borer (EAB) beetle began to wreak havoc in that region almost 10 years ago.
According to emeraldashborer.info, the EAB beetle was first imported on pallets from China and was discovered near Detroit. Suddenly, tens of millions of ash trees in southeastern Michigan alone were destroyed with tens of millions more lost in 17 of the American states and two Canadian provinces.
The destruction has mainly spread east and south-east from Michigan and north-east over the border. In August, Kansas and Massachusetts announced its arrival. Quigley believes it’s only a matter of time before it crosses over the Appalachian Trail into the Carolinas. What happens to his business then remains to be seen.
During the summer, I reached out to a few experts on this topic. Dr Deborah McCullough and Robin Usborne at Michigan State University both confirmed EAB could move west across Europe from Moscow where it is currently decimating ash trees.
“Right now, any Fraxinus species can be infested,” said Usborne. “But bear in mind that it’s not spread so quickly by its own accord — it is most often spread by humans through firewood, infested nursery material, or packing material. So we are the culprits. That is how it got to North America in the first place.”
Meanwhile, according to a report in this newspaper last week, chalara fraxinea has taken about 90% of Denmark’s ash population. The amount of Irish ash used in hurley production is about 12% in a manufacturing industry that outputs roughly 250,000 hurleys a year by about 120 makers, according to the Guild of Ash Hurley Makers.
Well-placed people in the GAA have told me that there are contingency plans in place. There’s no need for alarm yet. But still, we all need to agree that on both sides of the Atlantic, nothing will ever beat ash.
* john.w.riordan@gmail.com Twitter: JohnWRiordans
