Lesson for hurling as baseball suffers from ash backlash

As the cooler weather set in around the northern states of the US this month, the question arose once again: why oh why does the baseball season extend into October?

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.