Rawlings Wood Baseball Bats
Rawlings offers wood bats in as many models as they do aluminum bats. There's a Rawlings wood bat for everyone if you look hard enough. Wood bats are offered in multiple different models, woods, and lengths.
Rawlings offers four different series of wood bats and they are the Pro Preferred Wood bats, the Professional Wood bats, the Adult Wood bats, and Youth Wood bats. They are listed from most expensive, best made, and the competetive level of play you might find someone swinging one. You'll typically find most people swinging a Rawlings wood bat out of the Adult Wood series. The reason for this is very few people make it to the professional level, and all levels of play below that swing aluminum bats. Most people buy wood bats for practice, sand lot, or a wood bat league.
Wood bats come in in two different woods, Ash and Maple. Ash has typically been the wood of choice for bat makers and players, it was strong yet light enough to get a decent barrel size and still maintain a -2 to -4 weight difference. Maple, because of new technology has come in to it's own as the new wood of choice for players. Maple is much harder and more dense than ash. The grain doesn't split with continued use, and because of the density it compresses the ball more creating a 15-20% greater rebound than ash. Maple is overall a stronger wood, that will hit harder and farther than ash. Contrary to what people think maple is a much better bat for BP and training due to durability. Maple bats aren't for everyone though. If you swing an ash bat and make your money dropping the ball past the infield but before it gets to the outfield odds are you probably don't want a maple bat. When you start swinging that maple wood the extra rebound you get will probably turn your ball that drops into a fly out.
Maple is more expensive than ash bats but it's probably worth the money. You may try to save money if you buy a $30.00 ash bat, but you may go through 4 of them while a maple one would last you that long. Although, it's not guaranteed that maple will last longer. Sometimes you just hit that ball in the right spot to break a bat, but the majority of the time maple will last longer than ash.
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