To Splice or Not To Splice

A post sometime ago on the Cricinsight forum entitled 'Innovative yet forgotten bats'  drew attention to the GM Galaxy and the Newbery Hi-Tec as possibly "the earliest spliceless bats".  This got me thinking, were these really the earliest spliceless bats? If you look back through the long history of cricket bats it is clear that a statement like this is re-inventing the past.  So, for my own peace of mind, and to add some accuracy here is a little insight.

The earliest cricket bats from the 17th Century were made from a single piece of wood, and therefore did not possess a splice.  At the time they were not called spliceless bats, just bats. In the context of current bat language, these would and should be your ‘earliest spliceless bat’.

Patents from the archive: Nicolls and Wavex

In the late 1880’s Levi James Nicolls created a novel method of making a bat handle, for which he subsequently filed a patent (No. 14,250) in October 1888.  The handle was referred to as ‘The Automatic Bat Handle’ in magazine adverts.  One of these bats was used by WG Grace to score over 1,000 runs, and his 100th century.

Tendulkar's Magic Bat - epilogue

Well, it didn't go quite to plan. Only 18 in the World Cup Final, and out to a in-two-minds push away from the body, caught behind off Lasith Malinga.  India won anyway, since they have an astonishingly brilliant batting line-up.  But, what possessed the little Master to change his bat in the semi-final, and continue into the final?  Could it have been some gently applied pressure of adidas, one of his big sponsors?

"Please Lord Sachin, it's the world cup semi-final. Could you go out and score a a lot of runs with a nice new shiny adidas bat.  Zillions and gazillions are watching, and they aren't going to get turned on by those mucky old bats you usually trot out with, huh?"

I do hope it wasn't this. He is cataclysmically more important to cricket than a being a celebrity clothes horse to sell product, and be denied the best chance to craft his 100th century on such a grand stage in his home city by such a cheap compromise.

I hope it's revealed in any future ST biography. I'm intrigued.

Tendulkar's Magic Bat?

So, Sachin Tendulkar decided to take a new bat into the World Cup semi-final.  Well there's nothing interesting about that on its own.  However, his 85 run innings must have been one of the most charmed of all time in such an important match.  He was dropped four times, almost stumped (saved by one video frame) and given not out to an LBW appeal that left even the die-hard supporters of URDS looking in to their tea leaves for re-assurance.  Had this cricketing God imbued special powers on this new bat to try and get him to a World Cup final in his home city? If you believed in the supernatural you would say it could happen.

The Edge - innovation or gimmick?

Following on from the Dual T20 (double sided bat), GN have produced another novelty bat called The Edge for 2011.  Is this another case of letting the Marketing Department sniff glue once again?

The GN marketeers make a worthy opening line for The Edge, "Gray Nicolls continues to innovate the bat making process to keep pace with an ever changing game". Nothing wrong in that, although I thinks this innovation is more like the 'innovations' that appeared in the erstwhile Innovations Catalogue, which was full of things that were novel but mostly pointless. This is why I used the word novelty bat earlier.  It is in no way a genuine innovation.

Charting inventions in cricket bats

In some spare time a few years back I began to compile a record of patents relating to cricket bats. I now have a near definitive record for all patents published. An analysis of this data threw up a number of trends and notions around the inventiveness and capacity to invent in cricket playing nations. Some of these are instinctive, and some are revealing.
 
Bear in mind that this is a brief analysis of patents published. It does not include ideas and inventions or otherwise that were never patented, of which there must be many. The data provided here shows how human invention reveals itself in cricket bats, and I make a connection to their countries of origin. Not being a historian or social scientist I will leave more detailed interpretations and analysis to those with the knowledge to do so, but hope that any who do will share it and improve my own historical knowledge around cricket and creativity.
 
In total there has been (at least) 107 cricket bat related patents published since 1884.  On-line records show 100 patents going back as far as 1894.  An additional 7 have been found through research that date from 1884 to 1891. There may be a few more published patents hidden in the archives, although this is unlikely to be more than a handful.
 
The first graph below illustrates the frequency of patents applied or published by decades, and split between ideas for improvements in handles and blades.

Change required in cricket bat retailing

There appears to be a current trend in bat buying that might go something like this:
"I want a big edged bat with lots of meat in the middle"
"Here you are sir, this one should do nicely"
Cricketer swings bat in favoured strokes.
"Nah, it's too heavy.  I want one that looks big, but plays light"
“Ordinarily sir, I’d say wouldn’t we all! But today is your lucky day sir. We've just got these in this morning from India."

And so opened a Pandora's box that threatens some instability among bat makers using high-grade English willow.