The 2012 high school baseball season starts Monday afternoon with the annual Vrbicek Metro Baseball Tournament, not only a great tribute to a great man that I was lucky enough to know, but a sensational way to look at all of the Metro's baseball squads.

The season promises to be a interesting one, as always, and Don Taylor did a great job with his preview stories that you can read online here at the MSR website. Instead of rehashing what Don wrote about each team, I wanted to paint the picture with a much broader stoke of the brush, and discuss what I think will be the biggest story by far of the upcoming spring and summer.

This season will be the first season in high school baseball with the new BBCOR bats. The BBCOR bats have been authorized for use in both college and high school baseball. College teams actually started using them a year ago, and scoring has dropped dramatically. In fact, studies have shown that scoring in college baseball is down around 35 percent  since the last year of the "live" aluminum bats in 2010. Expect an even more dramatic drop in offense when the numbers come in for high school baseball this season.

In fact, take a picture of the offensive records at each school because a lot of them may not change for a long time.

And that is not a bad thing.

Not only were offensive numbers becoming borderline ridiculous across the country, safety concerns were also starting to mount because of the velocity at which baseballs were flying off of high-tech aluminum bats.

Nearly everyone that has followed baseball has watched highlights from college games of the past several seasons where a batter, on a check swing no less, has hit an opposite field 400 foot home run mainly because of the composition of the aluminum bats.

This will happen no more because the new BBCOR bats have more of the "old fashioned" wood bat sound and feel to them. If you hit the ball on the "sweet spot" of the bat it will still go. However, if you don't, more than likely you will be looking at a weak ground ball also leaving the batter with a "hand full of bees."

The change was made for the most part due to safety concerns. The way the ball flew off the old aluminum bats left very little reaction time for the defense, especially pitchers. Too many pitchers around the country were being seriously injured because of line drives coming back up the middle. The National Federation listened to coaches, players and others and decided to be proactive in changing the design of the bat not only for safety, but also to make the game better for all.

While the high school regular season has not started yet, I had a chance to watch many games from the various spring leagues around eastern Iowa over the past couple months. If those games are any indication, the high school game will be dramatically different this year. The ball is not coming off the bat as hard, or as far most of the time.

There is much more emphasis on pitching and defense and other fundamentals, you won't see very often this summer a particular team crush the other when they are thin on pitching.

Quite simply it's evened up the playing field. I think because of that we will see a change in the management of the game as well by coaches. I predict you will see much more "small ball". Bunting, stealing of bases and more hitting and running should be the norm this year.

Many of us have given our opinions over the years on how to improve the various games we all love. Here is a great example of groups listening to those pleas and making a great game even better.

Good luck to all the teams this summer, it should be a great year of high school baseball.

(Scott Unash is the sports and program director at KGYM-AM 1600 (FM 106.3). He is a six-time winner of the Iowa Broadcast News Association play-by-play Announcer of the Year Award. Scott and Mark Dukes co-host the Gym Class weekdays from 3-4 p.m. on KGYM-AM 1600 and FM-106.3)