Wooden baseball bats: Exclusive clubs

It turned out that the hardest props to find for “No Mean City: Baltimore 1966” were wooden baseball bats. Outside of professional baseball and certain amateur leagues, they are pretty much collector’s items, not commonly for sale in sporting goods stores. Our intrepid props hunter went to a Play It Again Sports store just outside Baltimore and found dozens of used and new bats for sale — all metal. Not a single bat was made of wood.

It figures, when you think about it, which is almost never: Little League, high school and collegiate baseball players have not used wooden bats in decades. The NCAA switched to metal bats in 1974. The reasons were twofold, according to Baseball America: “The switch was done partly to cut costs — metal bats last much longer than wood — but also to boost the offense of a game that was somewhat stagnant.”

High schools followed the trend, and by now metal bats are used everywhere but in professional baseball, major and minor, and some amateur leagues. “Professional baseball hasn’t adopted aluminum bats for a number of reasons, but mostly to preserve historical records that were achieved through player ability rather than bat technology,” explains justbats.com, a seller of both types. Our props finder located wooden bats, including some very old homemade ones, at private homes via eBay. Among those we use in the play: A Micky Mantle and a Ted Kluszewski.