From The Vault: The Caliph of Clink - Kenner Star 1996

    I was really anticipating a great afternoon of baseball in front of the tube.  LSU was playing Miami in the College World Series in Omaha.  Actually I have not followed professional  baseball all that much since I was a kid in the 50s and 60s, and college baseball got, basically, none of my attention at all.
    As the first few innings went along, I was only mildly involved, and was actually nodding off as I lay on my beanbag in the den. Then it happened.  “CLINK.”  What the heck was that? I woke up and saw a runner rounding the bases.  I then realized that he just hit a home run. . But the sound I heard was not the “CRACK!” of my youth.  It was “CLINK.”  Or maybe it was “CLUNK.”  It definitely was not “CRACK!”
    It then dawned on me  that these baseball players, these COLLEGE baseball players, these players a heartbeat away from the Major Leagues, were using ALUMINUM bats!
    Now, I knew that these metal monstrosities were being used in the Little League, and the Pony League, but I  never thought for a moment that they would be used in COLLEGE baseball.  I mean, how can you get used to what happens in the Majors if you’re using a metal bat in college? Does Major League Baseball know about this? If Babe Ruth were alive today, he’d be turning over in his grave!
    Oh my god! What would the Babe have done if he had had to use an aluminum bat?
Yes, he probably would have hit 60 home runs ( they tell me the ball travels farther with the metal bats), and he may have hit a hundred.  But he never would have gone down in history as the “SULTAN OF SWAT.”  He would have been the “CALIPH OF CLINK.”  Or maybe the “ BEHEMOTH OF BINK.”  It could even have been worse than that:
            THE PRINCE OF PLUNK
            THE KING  OF CLUNK
            THE MONARCH OF METAL
            THE AYATOLLAH OF ALUMINUM
            THE KAISER OF KAISER ( they made aluminum, you know).
            TITAN OF TIN
            THE CZAR OF CORRUGATION
            THE SULTAN OF SMELT!                    
If you ask me, the whole idea of aluminum bats SMELTS.  Babe Ruth or Bobby Thompson with a metal bat?  Bite your tongue.
    Somehow, when Warren Morris hit the game winning home run (“CLUNK”), it  wasn’t the same.  While the drama of it was thrilling enough, I just didn’t feel like jumping up and down yelling “The Tigers win the Series... The Tigers win the Series...the Tigers win the Series.”   I didn’t even feel like hugging the first person I could find. All I could think of was CLUNK.
    I saw Bobby Thompson hit the home run “ heard (CRACK!) ‘round the world” in 1951.  I knew Bobby Thompson ( for about five minutes at the Old Timers game in the Dome), and Warren Morris is no Bobby Thompson.  But he would have been, if only he had not been using that damned metal bat.