Possibly The Greatest Ever!?!?

As the days get longer the list of the sports topics and things to catch our interest dwindle as the mercury creeps up. And every summer the same thoughts creep into my head, who is the best or the greatest at various things. For most things it's easy like best Basketball player ever, or best golf player, but when you get down to it picking the best athlete in Georgia Tech history is a lot more difficult to discuss. First you have to lay out the groundrules:

1. Must have played at least two years at the school - While I don't think Thaddeus Young will ever be a Hall of Famer, it still doesn't feel like he was a real part of the Flats.
2. Their pro-career must be taken into account - It isn't just what they've done with the Old Gold on, but what have they come to represent as a professional or in stages off the Tech campus.
3. They must have contributed SOMETHING to Tech - Whether it was personal, All-American, hitting record, or team related, a National/Conference Title.

With that squared away let the debate begin (Feel free to leave suggestions in the comment section) and my nominee would have to go for Matt Wieters. In what is a pre-emptive strike on my part, I want to begin the Matt Wieters as Best Ever talk here today so I won't be described as a bandwagon. While his stay in pro-baseball has been brief just look at his numbers. Matt Wieters is playing a video game, while everyone else is struggling to make the majors. He leads the Carolina league in HR's, RBI's, OBP, Slug. and he's second in BA, & OBP. There is no hole in his game, and while Baltimore doesn't want to rush him to the majors it will soon be time for ESPN to put a "Get To Know Matt Wieters" montage put together. Who's your greatest Yellow Jacket of all time.

Elimination of Aluminum Bats

While I was browsing through the New York Daily News website (mostly to find more about the Yankees in yellow thongs), I noticed a family in New Jersey is filing a lawsuit against Little League Baseball because of the medical damage a line drive off an aluminum bat did to their son. It is a debate that has raged for decades on the safety and plausibility of wooden versus aluminum bats at levels below the professional ranks, and with the College World Series there is no better time to reignite that fire. Most people still debate the truth to the fact that a baseball leaves the bat faster off a metal bat versus the wooden, but just look at the physics behind a swing. If you go back to your first Physics class, you remember that energy can't be created or destroyed, but instead is transferred. So when a bat shatters in a thousand pieces (hopefully nowhere near Roger Clemens) imagine the energy it took to break that bat, and where did that energy come from? The baseball.

Not only would this solve some of the injury concerns parents have it would also improve the college game by an exponential amount. One reason, beside the money, a lot of players elect to skip the college experience and begin in the minors, is because of the ability to begin swinging the wooden bats as early as possible and develop a feel for them so that when they hit their mid 20's they are already stars on their way up the list of Baseball America's Top Prospects.

The simple cost of paying for a few extra bats would be well worth the develop of more refined college ball players and reduce the possibility of injury at younger levels. Plus that cost isn't even really THAT big of a hurdle to jump over. With all the wood around us, used for infrastructure and such, I'm sure that is a tree out there that can handle the constant barrage of force a wooden bat goes through.

An all wooden bat concept throughout baseball would usher in a brand new error, while ending the era of "Fear the PING".