I was watching the Blue Jays vs Orioles game on Baseball Tonight and they showed a clip of a broken bat shattering and flying directly into the home plate umpire's face. If the sharp splintered part of the bat had hit just right, it could easily have gotten past his mask and probably killed him.

Since nobody in baseball seems to think that shattered bats are a big deal, I propose we have a death pool. Somebody's going to eventually die from one of these broken bats, it's just a matter of when. I'm thinking that somebody gets killed by a broken bat sometime in 2007.

Actually... Maybe I should make this my mission. Major League Baseball needs to implement some sort of rule to curb the number of shattered bats in a baseball game. The simplest rule to me would be to call interference anytime a bat or a piece of the bat enters the field of play. Eventually, teams would get sick of giving up outs because of their cheap lumber. I think we're easily averaging a shattered bat every other game. It's only a matter of time before one catches somebody unawares (a la Clay Hensley) and actually hits them with the sharp part of the bat.

Everybody needs to write their Congressmen. We need to do something about this craziness!

Otherwise, my Broken Bat Death Pool date will be August 11th 2007.