It’s not surprising to us that youth are still being injured on the baseball field by balls hit off a metal bat. The latest injury happened to a boy in South Dakota in late April, when 11-year-old Trey Brown suffered a brain injury after being hit in the head by a ball hit off an aluminum bat.

We’re not surprised because, even though Little League International banned the use of composite bats, they didn’t rule out other metal bats. They should have!

Trey Brown came home from a local baseball game complaining of a headache and soon began vomiting. His parents took him to the hospital, where X-rays showed he had a 1-1/2 inch brain bleed. When he started having seizures, the hospital put him in a medically induced coma.

Though he’s out of the coma now and has started making improvements, the hospital plans to keep him there for three weeks to three months for rehabilitation and recovery. Trey would have been on a baseball team this summer. Now he can’t play for at least a year. His family says there’s no doubt that aluminum bats should be abolished.

“If it had been a wooden bat, we probably wouldn’t even be here,” his dad was quoted as saying. “I would rather see aluminum bats just completely banned from baseball.”