Beneath that braided bark lies wood that is hard, strong and flexible. For some of us, the best outdoor toys will always be whittled out of white ash. That's especially true of professional ballplayers from Class A towns to major league cities, and the spread of ash yellows has led to alarms about a dwindling supply of wood for bats. But don't expect the pros to switch to aluminum any time soon. Many other hardwood trees also cope with specific diseases, such as oak wilt.
Experts concur that the only species in real danger is the elm, from Dutch elm disease.
Certainly the number of ash trees felled to make bats has plummeted since aluminum came out to play in the 1960s. The production numbers for 1999 were 1.5 million aluminum bats and only a million turned from ash, with 20 percent of the latter going to professional teams. During the heyday of the wood bat, the company's sawmills turned 200,000 trees a year into perfectly round billets for the bat makers' lathes. These days, the Slugger factory needs only 40,000 ash logs a year. While two out of three big-league players swing Louisville Sluggers, the Rawlings Adirondack bat, made of white ash in the upstate New York village of Dolgeville, is the favorite of others, including McGwire and often Sosa.