"There goes $80," yelled Stepinac coach Pat Duffy, coach at Archbishop Stepinac High School, where Gordis is a senior.

For many involved in the hottest debate in local Catholic schools baseball, this won't come as a surprise.

The teams in New York's Catholic High School Athletic Association — whose members attend the approximately 75 high schools in the Archdiocese of New York and the Diocese of Brooklyn — overwhelmingly oppose a New York City law banning metal bats in competitive high school baseball across the five boroughs, but they have been forced to begin coping with the repercussions.

Duffy is a staunch opponent of the new law, which the CHSAA decided to apply to all its member schools to ensure competitive balance.

He said that since he began playing Catholic school baseball at Mount St. Michael Academy in the Bronx in 1977, he has never seen nor heard of an injury occurring because of a metal bat.

Yet that's not even his biggest problem with the new law. What Duffy can't understand is why the National Federation of State High School Associations, the New York State Public High School Athletic Association and the New York Catholic High School Athletic Association have all deemed metal bats safe — but the city has not.

"If one of those governing bodies had dictated rule changes, you would have gotten 90 percent compliance right away," Duffy said. "Those are athletic governing bodies."

Wally Stampfel, the CHSAA baseball chairman and coach at Mount St. Michael, had resigned himself to adhering to the law not long after it was passed in the spring. But a lawsuit filed to challenge the ruling was ongoing until a federal court ruled to uphold the law on Aug. 28. The timing gave schools just six days to prepare for the opening of the fall season.

Stampfel said the law mandates that CHSAA players can use wood bats that are approved by Major League Baseball for major- or minor-league play.

"We haven't been able to plan as much as we would've liked," Stampfel said after the Aug. 28 decision, before the season began. "With a week to go now, we're kind of hitting the panic button."

The panic isn't as widespread among the players, many of whom played in competitive wood-bat leagues over the summer and own their own bats.

Stepinac slugger Alex Maruri, one of the CHSAA's leading hitters last season, said there won't be much of an adjustment period for hitters used to wood, but it'll change how their high school games are played.

"It's going to be a lot less 'SportsCenter' and a lot more small ball," Maruri said.

Duffy took a poll of his players recently and found that 85 percent had played with a wood bat.

One who hadn't, sophomore Anthony Barrella, has since purchased a $50 maple bat. He expects it to increase his success at the plate.

"You have to get everything into the swing with a wood bat," Barrella said of his first impression. "With aluminum, you can get away with a bad swing."

Duffy believes that when the new brand of baseball is coupled with recruiters' emphasis on power hitting, it will ultimately hurt CHSAA players, whose competition for scholarships around the state and across the country will still be using aluminum bats.

The schools also face the matter of buying bats for players, who can share metal bats but aren't likely to do so with the more fragile wood.

Stampfel said many athletic departments don't budget for bats, but that will have to change, particularly in city schools where players won't have the money to purchase their own bats.