CLINTON TOWNSHIP, NJ — On a sunny fall afternoon, Rosa Yu stepped off the road at Round Valley Recreation Area and into the woods to perform the most grim task of her duties as a health specialist for the New Jersey Forest Service. White ash trees.
She arrived at a clearing, where a forest of ghostly gray bark looked haunting through the colorful leaves. As she had predicted, the trees whose canopies had colored the landscape in gold and maroon a year ago were dead or rapidly dying.
Mr. Yu said, “There are dead ash trees everywhere.” “It’s hard to find uninfected ash trees anywhere.”
That means she’s been infested by an invasive insect called emerald ash. These insects have been gnawing across North America for years, leaving behind huge patches of dead forest.
Among native tree species, ash trees make up a very small portion of the continent’s woodlands. However, there is one field where Ashe has historically dominated: baseball.
From Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak in 1941 to Roger Maris’ 61 home runs in 1961 and Mark McGwire’s 70 home runs in 1998, most of baseball history has been recorded with repeat bats.
Babe Ruth swung an ash bat that weighed 46 ounces. Ty Cobb had a casket maker create a casket for him. Ted Williams would visit the factory of Hillerich & Bradsby, makers of the Louisville Slugger, to select the wood he wanted engraved into his bat.
But today, ash has all but disappeared from baseball as trees face beetle-induced extinction. This postseason, which began with 12 teams and over 300 players from early October to early November, may be the first in a generation where Ashbat does not record a single at-bat.
In 2001, Hillerich & Bradsby was producing approximately 800,000 Ash bats per year, many of which went to dozens of major leaguers. Currently, there is only one Japanese person left in the company. This is Evan Longoria of the San Francisco Giants. His team didn’t make the postseason.
It’s as if entire major league ballparks suddenly stopped selling hot dogs. When Jack Marucci started making bats for his son in a backyard shed in the early 2000s, the wood he picked up from a lumber yard was ash. What else would he choose?
“That was essential,” Marucci said. “All I knew was an ash tree.”
The company he started, Marucci Sports and its sister brand Victus, now make bats for more than half of the big league players. This season, only five of Marucci’s customers requested ashes. None of Joey Votto, Javier Báez, Kevin Plawecki, Tim Beckham and Kiké Hernández made the playoffs.
There could also be others, like Brad Miller of the Texas Rangers. But Aaron Judge’s 62 home runs for the Yankees this season came off a maple bat.
Pete Tucci, founder of Tucci Limited in Norwalk, Conn., scoured logs to pinpoint the last customer who came in looking for a ash bat.
“It was Omar Narváez,” Tucci said, referring to the Milwaukee Brewers catcher. “He ordered six ash bats during spring training in 2020.”
That was it.
The change was not noticeable. A first-round draft pick of the Toronto Blue Jays in 1996, Tucci only swung at bats during his career. He tried maple, which became popular in the late 1990s. He didn’t like it.
Tucci said, “Other guys liked it, so I kept trying it.” “But I always came back to ashes.”
Baseball hitters are legendarily intuitive, and Tucci was no different. Ash wood is a softer wood and has a looser grain structure, making it prone to splitting and peeling. However, in the so-called sweet spot of the barrel, softer ash bats can bend on contact, creating a “trampoline” effect on the ball.
“The grain creates a little groove,” Tucci said. “I felt like the groove held the ball a little better and created more backspin. I felt like the ash bat performed better than the maple bat.”
But the story changed in 2009 when he started making bats. Joe Carter was the first notable star to experiment with maple bats in the 1990s. But after Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs in 2001 swinging a maple Sam bat from the Canadian company Original Maple Bat Corporation, dozens of others chose maple’s hard-but-light combination.
That’s a good thing too. Just as maple has become more popular, high-quality ash trees with 8 to 12 rings per inch have become more difficult to obtain.
At a New Jersey state park, Yu swung an ax at one of the dying ashes. She peeled off a pancake-sized section of skin like Velcro.
Mr. Yu said, “That shouldn’t happen.”
The emerald ash borer is about the size of a grain of rice. But it breaks through the protective bark of ash trees and swarms in the forest. It lays its eggs in the cambium layer, and the larvae eventually feed there, depriving the tree of essential nutrients from the inside. Once satisfied, the winged insects pop out of the tree and begin the cycle again.
Efforts have been made to stop or slow the borer’s progression since it was first discovered in Michigan, USA, in 2002. However, they have been spotted as far north as Winnipeg and Manitoba, and as far south as Texas. It was discovered in Oregon this summer.
Recently, Yu has been helping the New Jersey Department of Agriculture attempt biological control by releasing parasitic wasps that are known to prey on emerald ash tree caterpillars. But it will take years for predators to catch up to the numbers needed to fight off the borers. The borers are native to Asia and likely migrated to the United States on container ships.
Meanwhile, the tree is dying.
“Nature has a very resilient way of holding on,” Yu said. “I think there will still be ash, but it will take a long time for it to get back to where it was.”
Bobby Hillerich, a fourth-generation bat maker at Hillerich & Bradsby, admitted the company was late to fully realize the impact. The Louisville Slugger originated in 1884 using ash and hickory, heavy woods that became popular in the 1940s.
For more than 100 years, Hillerich & Bradsby has sourced lumber from sawmills throughout the heavily forested northern regions of Pennsylvania and across the southern border in New York. The forests were abundant enough to cut down 40,000 trees a year to make the Louisville Slugger at a cost of only 90 cents per board foot.
“We had the illusion that it could be contained,” Hillerich said of the insect infestation. “It was probably years later that we realized this wasn’t going the way we thought it would.”
Hillerich said the company still produces 325,000 to 350,000 ash bats per year, but these are lower-end products that customers can find at local retailers.
“It’s usually used for protection or as a Halloween costume,” Hillerich said.
Regardless of the bore, Hillerich believes maple’s sturdiness and consistency may still make it the most popular wood used by major league players. But if bat manufacturers had been able to maintain supply, demand for ash would probably have remained strong, he said.
“We had to have some tough conversations with some guys,” Hilarych said. “We said we were not sure of the supply of ash we were getting. We cannot guarantee that what they are wielding is quality wood.”
Birch trees are another species that has gained a greater foothold in the ash void. But there is a drawback here too.
“Players don’t like the sound,” Hillerich said.
Jason Grabosky, director of the Rutgers Urban Forestry Program, is more optimistic than most about the future of North American ash trees. Because they can shed large quantities of seeds, new generations of ash trees may take root even after borers have devastated older ones.
But in baseball, it’s the end of an era.
“It will be at least a generation before the ash bats come back,” Grabosky said. “But if we have kids who play baseball, we’ll still want ash bats.”
