“We’re watching all this very closely,” said Brian Boltz, the general manager of the Larimer & Norton company, whose Russell mill each day saws, grades and dries scores of billets destined to become Louisville Slugger bats. “Maybe it means more maple bats. Or it may be a matter of using a different species for our bats altogether.”

Such uncertainty does not sit well with professional players, some of whom shun (or break) bats that have failed them and worship those that have sent balls out of the park. (Some widely suspect that the well-known players get the best-quality wood, and the rookies, something softer.) Baseball, after all, is a game of routine, of instinct, of superstition.

The magic in a perfect bat is not easy to define. “You can’t describe it — it’s a feel,” said Scott Podsednik, an outfielder for the White Sox. “When you pick it up and take a couple of swings with it, you just know.”

After batting practice one morning, Podsednik’s teammate Uribe sheepishly confirmed his lectures to his bats (his beloved “Hoosier HB 23” models). “I tell them: ‘Do your job and if you don’t do your job, I’m going to have to go back to the Dominican Republic,’ ” Uribe said in Spanish. “Sometimes they listen; sometimes they don’t.”

For much of a century, ash was the wood that ruled the realm of baseball bats, but it has faced threats before: First, competition from aluminum and composite bats (which whisked away much of the youth and amateur market but are barred from professional baseball) and then, in the past decade, from the sugar maple.

When it became known that Barry Bonds of the San Francisco Giants, who is closing in on baseball’s career home-run record, was using maple bats, change swept through baseball’s clubhouses.