And The Bat Stashed Under Dad’s Bed He Thinks He Can Use In Case Robbers Come To Steal Us . . . That, Too?

And you thought it would stop at trans fats and the “N” section of the dictionary. No, they’ve come for your softball games, too:

New York City would become one of the first cities in the country to prohibit the use of metal bats in high school baseball games, under a bill that a City Council committee approved yesterday and that the full Council is considered all but certain to pass tomorrow.

. . .

The Council’s Youth Services Committee approved the bill on a 4-to-0 vote. The bill has 32 sponsors and the support of the Council speaker, Christine C. Quinn. They would need 34 votes, two-thirds of the 51 members on the Council, to override a veto by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

“The mayor has some skepticism both about whether this bill fixes the problem it says it does and whether this is something the government should be doing,” a mayoral spokesman, Stu Loeser, said yesterday. “He has made no decision about a veto.”

According to the Council, it would cost the city’s public high schools $253,500 to replace 5,070 metal or metal-composite bats used by 169 baseball teams with wood bats, and $67,600 a year thereafter to replace broken wood bats. The bill’s sponsors said they would ask donors to defray the costs for private and parochial schools.

. . .

Metal bats were introduced in the early 1970s as a cost-saving alternative to wood bats, and by the early 1980s, a consensus had emerged among players and coaches that metal bats outperform wood ones. The National Collegiate Athletic Association first adopted guidelines for limiting bat performance in 1998.

Researchers from Brown University found in 2001 that baseballs hit with a metal bat traveled faster than those hit with a wood bat, but could not conclusively identify the factors responsible for the difference in performance. Since then, the N.C.A.A. and the National Federation of State High School Associations have adopted rules requiring that metal bats perform no better than the best wood bats.

On Sunday, Richard M. Greenwald, one of the Brown researchers, wrote that he knew of no scientific data to support the notion “that the use of nonwood bats poses an unacceptable risk to children, particularly high school competitive players,” according to an e-mail message released by [metal bat maker] Easton Sports.