I recently heard that an alum. bat manufacturer was sued because a baseball, that was hit by an alum. bat struck a pitch in the head, and he eventually died from the injury. My question is based in the information that the player only had a fraction of a second to react to the ball coming at him. Is a ball coming of a wooden bat that much slower that it leaves adequate time to react? I would think that there isn't much difference between the too, that the difference is more about how hard the ball was thrown, and how fast the hitter can swing the bat.

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and how fast the hitter can swing the bat.

Bingo.

The MBs aren't terribly good at sports myths. Sometimes, they're just too hard to quantify. They were particularly bad in this episode because their entire premise was wrong on the bat issue and sliding into 2nd.

This has been beat to death in other posts so you should be able to find those conversations but here's what their research staff should have gotten right.

1. Alum vs wood. Supposedly, the alum bat allows the batter to swing the bat harder/faster causing the ball to go further and faster. What they had wrong was the robot that swung both bats at the same speed. I have no idea if the myth is true since the wooden bat has more mass which would probably put an equal amount of force on the pitch at a slower rate of swing. Having played through HS, I always hit the ball harder with aluminum. You don't see many college players using wood either.

2. Their presumption was that sliding into 2nd gets you to the base faster. Sliding is designed to put the brakes on fast so that you don't slide past 2nd and get tagged out. They would have had the correct premise if it had been sliding into 1st. As a Little League manager, we tell the kids to never, never slide into 1st. Always run through. We don't tell them that we may occasionally slide into 1st in our softball games because it is something that is really better left to instinct.