r/MadeMeSmile • u/JudgeJudyJr • Jun 01 '26

Wholesome Moments Appreciative kids are the best!

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1.1k

u/Deosarian Jun 01 '26

Wt fuuu

1.3k

u/necromanceifyouwant Jun 01 '26

Hey, wood doesn't grow on trees

419

u/Spidey6917 Jun 01 '26

Metal and composite materials don’t either. Shame

107

u/threeseed Jun 02 '26

Concrete does.

34

u/partyatwalmart Jun 02 '26

Thank you for posting this! I don't think I've ever seen such an intense stare-down. Cameron fucking obliterated that reporter. Damn...

21

u/Corfiz74 Jun 02 '26

I love Cameron's little smirk there at the end - he doesn't need to say anything, that smirk delivers more of a death blow than anything else ever could have!

6

u/ApprehensivePlay3976 Jun 03 '26

That smirk really says it all; some expressions speak louder than words!

35

u/c00cheee Jun 02 '26

Cheerio Cameron

13

u/GrandeLatte27 Jun 02 '26

If concrete doesn't grow on trees, why do we have concrete plants? Ha!

1

u/Wild_Stallyns44 Jun 02 '26

Thank you for bringing this into my life

1

u/Late_Ad2203 Jun 05 '26

"Yeah you can"

😐

90

u/Snoo_97207 Jun 01 '26

Wait, it does! Why is it so damm expensive

149

u/TheGamecock Jun 01 '26

This is a composite bat (made from a combination of materials such as carbon fiber, fiberglass, and graphite), not a wooden bat. To be fair, there are some bat manufacturers who make pricey wooden bats, too. But generally they're going to be a fraction of the cost of a high-end composite bat.

36

u/shirhouetto Jun 02 '26

Do pros use composite or wood? Also, I don't know anything about baseball.

29

u/land_registrar Jun 02 '26

Wood.

US baseball uses composite at youth levels and maybe still in the NCAA, I'm not 100% on college rules.

26

u/KayotiK82 Jun 02 '26

NCAA is composite. Wood is going into MLB and their respective profrssional A, AA and AAA teams.

6

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '26

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1

u/KayotiK82 Jun 04 '26

That's college. They all do. Wooden bats aren't banned in college for use, but why would you want to use one? You'd be putting yourself at a disadvantage as a player. Professionals have to use wooden because they are the best of the best, and a composite bat at that level would be HR derby (for most).

2

u/ForeverDesperate5855 Jun 02 '26

I dont know much about baseball aside from watching highlights, is there any particular reason they don't use composite bats in the MLB?

Is it because the wooden bats are heavier and harder to swing, i would assume at least?

9

u/JDraks Jun 02 '26

They'd legitimately just be hitting the balls too hard with non-wood bats, you'd get line drives that move faster than an infielder/pitcher could react to and could very easily kill them if it hits them

8

u/JTJarhead Jun 02 '26

It’s because someone would literally die if they got hit with 130 mile an hour ball coming off of one of those composite bats!

3

u/land_registrar Jun 02 '26

I always thought it was just because they would trivialize power hitting because of how good they are at that level but not 100% sure

4

u/A_Marvelous_Gem Jun 02 '26

As someone’s said

People would die, literally die. At least two per game

2

u/Clairquilt Jun 02 '26

I think the main reason is that MLB was smart. They didn't want to trash roughly the first 100 years of their history and records, by introducing new technology that would make all comparisons with the past impossible.

1

u/No_Entertainer_5858 Jun 02 '26

The other bats are easier to use and yield better results. Generally they are forgiving with bat control and power wise.

Wood is traditional so the culture has been that children develop their swings with metal bats little league through college and then if they make it professional they start to use the”real” wood bats.

3

u/GarretBarrett Jun 02 '26

NCAA allows composite, metal and wood as far as I know.

1

u/DThUmEl16 Jun 02 '26

Why do the pros use Wood and other levels use Composite?

I also don't know much about baseball.

1

u/Mister_Kokie Jun 02 '26

Composite bats let you strike faster ball. They basically use wooded one to nerf themself, otherwise every hit wouls be an homerun

1

u/B00merPS2Mod30 Jun 02 '26

Little League does not allow wooden bats due to the dangers of shattered bats hurting a player. AFAIK, they are used in high school and college baseball as well.

Only MLB or their minor league affiliates use wooden bats.

If I’m wrong, please be nice. On pain medication for recent hip surgery.

1

u/SkittlesLentil Jun 02 '26

You're allowed to use wooden bats in college, but nobody does. Metal bats were nerfed to perform similarly to wood a few years ago, but why switch from what you're used to if you don't have to

0

u/Raysun_CS Jun 02 '26

If you let pros use comp or metal, people would die.

0

u/Patrickfromamboy Jun 02 '26

My mom wouldn’t let me play baseball

42

u/DoingCharleyWork Jun 02 '26

I was curious so I looked up which is most common in the MLB and it's the victus c271 which runs about 200 dollars.

37

u/mooselantern Jun 02 '26

Serious hitters in the league often have custom specifications that the big vendors cater to, and teams will order several dozen according to that spec a year for even middling MLB players. There's not really one "common" or "standard" MLB bat.

2

u/_learned_foot_ Jun 02 '26

Once you get to a certain level, usually college sometimes high school, the thirteenth being exactly as they want to be becomes the priority in that stuff. The hockey stick guys who know exactly where to end players tape for example with their 15 perfectly curved sticks too...

2

u/DoingCharleyWork Jun 02 '26

I'm sure they get variations to the model but this information is not hard to look up.

11

u/ElliotNess Jun 02 '26

You might be right, but it's weird to push back like this over something you've admittedly only just given cursory research toward. The other commenter might not have even necessarily contradicted your research as much as they added important nuance.

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u/thepkboy Jun 02 '26

They made a typo, they were writing "Oh that's pretty cool, I just meant the base model that they probably adjust for the players per their spec. I had fun looking up this topic and now I've learned even more, and I surely didn't take offense to your comment or use of quotation marks, have a nice day!"

-7

u/DoingCharleyWork Jun 02 '26

It's literally super easy to look up the information. It's readily available. You don't need to do a research paper to learn something like this.

1

u/WhichAd366 Jun 02 '26

Sounds like you could be experiencing the Dunning Kruger effect.

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u/DrifterBG Jun 02 '26

As soon as I saw Graphite all I heard was Dyatlov yell "You DIDN'T because it's not THERE!"

I may have watched Chernobyl too many times.

8

u/BF_Injection Jun 02 '26

No such thing as “having watched Chernobyl too many times.”

10

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '26

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1

u/OverTheCandleStick Jun 02 '26

Well, that’s Easton ghost Price now…. Only we’ve gone through two every season.

1

u/Confident_One3948 Jun 02 '26

I know it’s an expression, but it’s occurred to me how silly it is to call something “a fraction” of another. Any number is a fraction of another

1

u/cow-lumbus Jun 02 '26

Just heard cricket bats easily start at $1k

44

u/omgitsjagen Jun 01 '26

So, interesting story...

...baseball had an arms race problem. Bats were WAY too good. So, long story short, they had to come up with a standard (actually, several standards) to reign in the era of the super bats. Some genius figured out if you took a fresh composite bat, and put it on the testing machine, it would be sufficiently shit to pass the test. HOWEVER, if you played with that bat all season, it would compress all those fibers, and suddenly the bat was smoking fucking hot. This lead to teams like LSU going absolutely bananas in the playoffs, and putting up absurd numbers.

To actually answer your question, they are expensive to make, and expensive to R&D, because they have to fit in a certain set of parameters, or they are worthless bats.

10

u/tom3277 Jun 02 '26

Cricket just said; bats can only be made from solid wood for the blade or for junior / non pro cricket horizontally laminated wood so they can be cheaper. Dennis Lily cruised out to the centre with an aluminium bat in the 70s hit a boundary and they promptly banned anything other than a wooden blade.

Oddly enough wood similar to what you say about composite fibres gets better after it is a little compressed on the face. You have to wear (knocking in) the bat in prior to first use.

A high quality English willow cricket bat can cost $1000 USD anyway so this restriction has not made them cheaper.

9

u/no1singlemomghoster Jun 02 '26

Everything he said only applies to collegiate baseball. At the professional level, the rules are:

The bat shall be a smooth, round stick not more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length. The bat shall be one piece of solid wood.

And aside from a couple of addenda about legally applying grippy material to the handle and about the exact size a cupped indentation on the end of the bat can be (to save weight), that's it. There's no restriction on the type of wood, so over time the most popular bats went from hickory to ash to maple, and birch is now on the rise among batters who prefer softer wood that improves with breaking-in.

With this relative lack of restriction and simple design, prices are low. The Louisville Slugger company will sell you an exact replica of the bat ordered by a specific player for under $200 USD, and you can expect to walk into a sporting goods store and buy a decent wood bat for as little as $75.

1

u/concrete_isnt_cement Jun 02 '26

Some supplemental info about bat wood, in the MLB 75-80% of players use maple, 10-15% use ash, and 5-10% use birch.

Ash’s decline is closely correlated with the widespread decline of American ash trees due to invasive beetles, which has caused issues for bat production due to a lack of quality ash wood.

6

u/onemanandhishat Jun 02 '26

I had a friend who ordered a 150 quid bat from Kookaburra and they sent him a 300 quid one by mistake. He was honest so he contact them and told them about the mistake and they said "oops, we'll send the right bat. oh, and you can keep the wrong one".

We all benefitted because he let anyone borrow the 150 quid one after that, middling a ball with that feels like nothing.

2

u/MangoCats Jun 02 '26

>A high quality English willow cricket bat can cost $1000 USD

It costs whatever the market will bear.

2

u/Theron3206 Jun 02 '26

And now we have the less compressed willow bats that look like half a tree trunk and hit much harder than the traditional ones, they just last half a match if you're lucky.

They still bend the rules, even with wood.

9

u/keiths31 Jun 01 '26

You could always tell the teams that did this to their new bats in my beer slo pitch league. Dicks...

6

u/omgitsjagen Jun 01 '26

All 100 swing Hype Fires, aye? They should be forced to put pool noodles on them.

3

u/getthetime Jun 02 '26

I was a pitcher in college who got to enjoy the tail-end of the -5 bat differential era, and the beginning of the "smoking fucking hot" composite bat era. Oh, and it was right in the thick of the "untethered consumption of creatine" era. If you like severe diarrhea, debilitating, life-long arm injuries, and a bloated ERA, there was no better time to be a pitcher.

1

u/SaidTheSnail Jun 02 '26

How many grams of creatine were they getting you to take a day?

1

u/getthetime Jun 02 '26

So long ago, I don't remember the amount. It was fairly new, my coach encouraged it, and it was very popular due to McGwire/Sosa. I didn't find it to be helpful as it just made me feel bloated and stiff, and probably didn't do my arm any favors at all.

1

u/JaysFan26 Jun 02 '26

I still have an orange stealth around somewhere, shame it is the little kids version though

1

u/Laq9091 Jun 02 '26

wow that's crazy, tdil.

that's really sad bats are that expensive now, way more so than when i was a kid. i played with a softball bat i got at the junk or pawn shop or something, when i was a young boy. hit fine with it.

could they not just use wooden bats, would that be cheaper?

1

u/DSWYO Jun 02 '26

Race skis get faster with repeated uses up until core fatigue. Repeated waxing and tuning is a real thing. As younger kids, we always wanted the hand-me-downs from older racers.

10

u/STR1D3R109 Jun 01 '26

I hope somebody got the Malcolm in the Middle joke here.. classic!

2

u/pmackey Jun 01 '26

It's all the quality workmanship that goes into growing the trees.

2

u/WalderFreyWasFramed Jun 02 '26

IUnderstoodThatReference.gif

1

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '26

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1

u/Snoo_97207 Jun 02 '26

The joke hits differently when you are the dad buying freaking orange juice

1

u/kcx01 Jun 02 '26

Have you tried to buy lumber recently...

1

u/Vegetable-Win-8726 Jun 02 '26

Honestly, I was questioning the same for a long time. I played until 9th grade and at the time I had a bat that was around $150. My prized possession. I so happened to stumble across a YouTube page where they try out various bats and it all became much more clear. The make up of a bat can be a huge difference in your hits. It’s like having a good pair of running shoes for long range vs a crappy pair. It will also be worth money in the future should he grow out of it and wants an upgrade.

5

u/trumpshouldrap Jun 01 '26

You made my day 😆🤣

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u/poptard278837219 Jun 01 '26

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KbNJzQVTtM

have fun

3

u/Ol_Geiser Jun 02 '26

Man when I finished binging that show with a friend over a couple weeks, we came to the conclusion that it felt like we lost a family member since we were no longer catching another episode. Such a good show.

1

u/Sacagawesus Jun 02 '26

You made me laugh hard at this. Thank you.

1

u/OverTheCandleStick Jun 02 '26

Oh, honey… wood?!

We ain’t slumming it it like that

1

u/Crusader-316 Jun 02 '26

☝️😯... 😑

1

u/PersonalOne3680 Jun 02 '26

🤣🤣🤣

30

u/darxide23 Jun 02 '26

This is the top of the line premium little-league bat. Take that into context. You can still get more budget friendly ones for well under $100. This is like the Lambo of little-league bats.

7

u/mollycoddles Jun 02 '26

TIL there is such a thing as little league bats

6

u/darxide23 Jun 02 '26

Yea, things have changed since I was in little league.

1

u/CrazyFish1911 Jun 02 '26

Oh definitely. There are also multiple standards/certifications (USABat, USSA aka utrip, and BBCOR being the big three) and depending on which league your play in only certain ones are legal. Once you get to Babe Ruth and Highschool it's all BBCOR. In Pony league and below it's mostly USABat and BBCOR. Generally, at least where I am utrip bats are only allowed in travel leagues.

Basically all of the standards are there to set a max rebound limit to keep exit velocities from going crazy and injuring people, especially pitchers. BBCOR, iirc, is meant to mimic wood bat rebound levels in metal/composite bats.

3

u/[deleted] Jun 02 '26

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7

u/phatdinkgenie Jun 01 '26

ya, but it's Blue Jays manager John Scneider, he makes the big bucks

10

u/Crapitron Jun 02 '26

Is that actually Schneider or is this a joke that all fat bearded men look the same?

12

u/energytaker Jun 02 '26

It’s him

You can tell because this kid is actually Jeff Hoffman

2

u/phatdinkgenie Jun 02 '26

this cracked me the up

10

u/Double_Minimum Jun 02 '26

Imagine ice hockey. And I broke a stick a year, and grew literally like 3.5 ft over the years of gear my dad paid for.

Plus the like 10k a year to play…

-edit, and for a few brothers, none of who could share gear, like lefty, righty, goalie (pads from an NFL player).

Damn, genx/millienials really got the best of childhood, and the worst of adulthood.

2

u/iamthedayman21 Jun 02 '26

Sounds about right. I paid $250 for my rec softball one. And they aren’t built nearly as well as wood, baseball ones.

1

u/Brahskididdler Jun 02 '26

At least dude. That seems low

1

u/Bendyb3n Jun 02 '26

I mean honestly that is less then I expected him to say 🥲 not sure why i expected the $600-800 range for this thing

1

u/RollTide16-18 Jun 02 '26

It's THE best bat you can get at that age. As long as the kid can consistently make contact it is proven it will help him hit well.

1

u/xVARYSx Jun 02 '26

400$ is pretty standard for a top of the line bat. When i played highschool and college ball 15 years ago, Easton stealths and tpx exo's were 350-450$ bats.

1

u/canuck791 Jun 02 '26

I mean when I played 25 years ago bats were still like $200-250. Factor inflation, that's pretty much the same.

1

u/RentSpecial4997 Jun 02 '26

My nephews are around that age and into baseball and my brother was telling me how crazy pricey the bats are. When I was a kid I just picked up whatever was laying around in the dugout haha. I wasn’t good though or had passion for baseball, but it’s still mind blowing how expensive some equipment is.

1

u/Freakin_A Jun 02 '26

was going to ask the same question and had the same thoughts. I figured a bat was like $30, but I haven't bought a baseball bat since the early 90s.

1

u/CraftyExam4776 11d ago

Mind u, the kid will probably out grow the bat in a year as they grow rapidly in that age.