When a bat breaks, chopsticks are born

TOKYO — The bats the Red Sox and the Dodgers break during the World Series are likely to be sold at team stores or by memorabilia companies, donated to charity, given away or even repurposed as wooden handles for bottle openers.

In Japan’s version of the World Series, which started Saturday in a country meticulous about recycling, cracked and splintered bats may find another use as objects indispensable to life here: chopsticks.

Each season, thousands of damaged bats are reprocessed into reusable “kattobashi,” a mash-up of the Japanese word for chopsticks and a baseball chant that translates as “get a big hit.”

The recycling is part of a conservation effort, designed to be decades long and to help preserve and replenish a species of ash tree known as aodamo, native to Japan and a region of eastern Russia. Aodamo wood — durable, light, flexible and resistant to splintering — was once used to make most of the professional bats here. But baseball officials, sporting goods companies and conservationists say aodamo is no longer considered economically feasible to log on the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, considered the sweet spot for bat production.

At one time, Japanese stars like Ichiro Suzuki and Hideki Matsui used aodamo bats. So did some Americans like Mike Piazza. But forestry officials did not systematically replant the trees as they were felled. Now most bats are made from maple and white ash, mostly imported. Mizuno and Zett, two leading Japanese sporting goods manufacturers, no longer make bats from aodamo ash. The hope is that if the reforestation project is successful over the next half century or so, aodamo will again become feasible for baseball.

News articles first sounded alarms about the decreased availability of aodamo wood in 2000. An article was read by officials at the Hyozaemon chopsticks company, founded in 1921, with an office in Tokyo and a factory in Obama City, Japan.

Hyozaemon’s chief executive, Hyogoo Uratani, 73, had played baseball in high school and was intrigued. He contacted a friend, Takeo Minatoya, 81, who had been a professional pitcher for the Taiyo Whales of Japan’s Central League and, later, a general manager and consultant for the team, now called the Yokohama BayStars.

At the time, broken bats were mostly given away or burned in barrels to keep players warm during spring training, Mr. Minatoya said. The bats-into-chopsticks idea, he said, allowed Japanese baseball “to start having a conscience about recycling.”

He helped persuade the 12 teams in Japan’s Central and Pacific Leagues to participate. Hyozaemon pays a licensing fee to put team logos on its chopsticks. In turn, Nippon Professional Baseball, Japan’s equivalent of Major League Baseball, makes an annual contribution of about $31,000 to the nonprofit Aodamo Preservation Society.

Hyozaemon said it collects an average of 10,000 broken bats each season. They are gathered by a courier service, whose records indicate it collected approximately 2,180 bats in July, August and September from professional and industrial leagues and collegiate teams that still use wood — unlike American universities, which use metal bats.