Free Baseball Bats in the Bronx

For decades, the Yankees celebrated Bat Day by handing thousands of wooden bats to fans at Yankee Stadium. What could possibly go wrong?

Imagine 40,000 baseball fans showing up to a game and thousands of them—young and old—being handed wooden baseball bats. Now imagine these adults drinking beer for 9 innings, getting loud, coaching from the stands. Imagine if the home team lost. Oh, and the home team is the New York Yankees. Chaos would surely ensue. After all, you have a combination of drunk adults, children, and teenagers armed with melee weapons.

The marketing team of the Yankees inadvertently created the opening scene of a New York gang movie. Blood flowed like milk. The local hospitals filled with victims, and the police took two days to—

No, wait—none of that happened.

The Yankees held Bat Day for decades, beginning in the 1950s and continuing into the early 1990s.

From the 1960s and into the 1970s, the Yankees gave out youth-sized wooden bats, 28–32 inches, made from solid wood and solid enough for Little League baseball. The adult-size bats were heavier and longer by 3–5 inches. I don’t know how reassuring that distinction becomes if someone is swinging one at your head.

But even these smaller bats were perfectly capable of causing chaos. And yet a quick search of “Bat Day Massacre” returned a link to “Yankee Granny Is ‘Bat’ Girl.” We’ll talk about that in a moment.

It wasn’t just the Yankees who thought arming their fans was a good idea. Cleveland, Detroit, Kansas City, and other clubs also participated, though they, like New York, eventually shifted to miniature souvenir bats, foam bats, caps, bobbleheads, and other promotional items.

Can you imagine the marketing and legal discussion if this were suggested today?

“How many liability waivers?”

“What about eye protection?”

“What if someone swings it?”

“What if someone sues?”

In 1968, they apparently skipped directly to “Order forty thousand.”

I remember listening to a Yankees game on the radio when the announcers were almost drowned out by a constant pounding.

Phil Rizzuto—the longtime voice of the Yankees and, yes, the play-by-play announcer in Meat Loaf’s Paradise by the Dashboard Light—finally broke off with his trademark “Holy cow…” and explained that it was Bat Day and thousands of fans were banging their souvenir bats against the stadium.

Thousands of kids had discovered that souvenir bats also made excellent drumsticks.

Try to picture it. Forty thousand people carrying wooden bats through the turnstiles, balancing hot dogs and scorecards while kids took practice swings at imaginary fastballs. Every foul ball was met with thousands of bats pounding against aluminum seats, concrete, and railings. Yankee Stadium didn’t just sound loud. It sounded like someone had challenged a lumberyard to a drum solo.

In retrospect, this seems like a horrible idea. We have seen rowdy fans burn cars whether the home team wins or loses. Surely giving free bats to the drinking public would end like a scene from Braveheart.

In 1984, researchers published “Impact of Yankee Bat Day on Blunt Force Trauma in Northern New York City.” That’s the actual title.

Researchers were trying to test something emergency physicians had long assumed: Bat Day produced a spike in assaults with catcher’s gloves—kidding!—baseball bats.

The study examined baseball-bat injuries reported by ten ERs in the Bronx and northern Manhattan during the ten days before and the ten days after Bat Day.

The increase? Goose eggs.

Thirty-eight before Bat Day, thirty-six after, and three with unclear timing.

The authors concluded, “There was no public-health reason to discontinue Bat Day because distributing the bats did not increase bat-related trauma.”

Unless you ran into Vera Curioli—the Bronx Bomber Bat Granny.

Ms. Curioli was opening Villarina, an Italian eatery in Tuckahoe, New York, a historic village north of New York City, when a hooligan forced his way in and demanded cash.

The New York Post—of course it was the Post—reported the following:

“I saw he didn’t have any pockets, so I didn’t think he had a gun,” Ms. Curioli, 68, said.

She threw some dollar bills on the floor.

The man bent over, and she whacked him on the head. Twice.

“Get a job,” she shouted as the thief ran away.

Ms. Curioli’s weapon of choice: a 16-inch-long souvenir bat she kept by the door.

The Yankees rewarded her with a full-sized bat in a separate ceremony for her bravery. Apparently the Yankees looked at the incident and concluded the problem wasn’t the bat. It was the size.

Postscript: As I finished writing this, Ben Rice hit his 27th home run against Tampa Bay.

In the video, it looks like two groups of fans ducking the ball. But as Evan Roberts and Tiki Barber pointed out on WFAN, they may not be hiding from the ball at all.

In one case, a child folds down behind the seats. In another, a woman ducks while the man beside her appears to shield her. What they seem to see is the crowd coming from behind them—fans climbing over rows and lunging for the baseball.

Sixty years after Bat Day, the bat still isn’t what I’d worry about.