Two years ago, a broken bat came close to killing an umpire and it was then that I predicted somebody was going to actually die before baseball would do something to fix what is an obvious bloody mess waiting to happen. Well, I was partly wrong. They're going to do something, but I can't quite tell what. From ESPN:
Baseball will start testing bats following Tuesday's meeting of a player-management safety committee, but the sport made no decision on the contentious issue of banning maple models.
Oh good. Let's undergo a series of tests.
"I don't know if there's an immediate short-term solution to this because even the data that we do have, it's tough to quantify it," [Met's reliever, Aaron] Heilman said. Only hours after the meeting, plate umpire Brian O'Nora was hit in the head by a shattered piece of Miguel Olivo's broken maple bat, sending blood streaming down his face and forcing him out of Tuesday night's game between Colorado and Kansas City.
I hate how baseball has to "quantify" this kind of stuff. Here's a question for the "quants": Is it ever appropriate for an umpire to leave a pool of blood at home plate?
If the answer is "No", then the quantitative statistic I point at is that the number of umpires leaving bloody pools at home plate is greater than, or equal to, 1 this season.
SOLUTION
If any part of the bat enters the field of play, the batter is called out on interference and base runners must return to the base that they were on at the beginning of the at-bat.
Simple. Effective.