The new bats the NCAA rolled out at the start of baseball season have not been a home run.

Though the tweaks were meant to improve player safety from line drives, the decreased power led to a drop in hitting numbers across the board in college baseball.

Compared to last season’s numbers, most teams’ batting averages, runs per game, ERAs and number of home runs all dropped.

The OU baseball team hit 105 home runs in 68 games last season for a 1.55 per-game average, but that number fell to 41 in 60 games this season (.690).

Big 12 Conference teams hit 619 home runs collectively in 2010. This year, the conference hit 300 fewer home runs.

The silence of the “ping” substantially affected batting lineups in every conference, most notably the renowned power-hitting Southeastern Conference.

Even the three SEC teams that advanced to this weekend’s College World Series — Florida, South Carolina and Vanderbilt — had a dip in production.

The Gators’ home-run average dropped from 1.30 in 2010 to .93 this year, the Gamecocks dropped from 1.39 to .73 and the Commodores slipped from .95 to .70.

The plunge of offense — due to the new bat’s smaller sweet spot and slower ball speeds after impact — forced most teams to rethink their strategies.

The lineups became dependent on all hitters producing, not just the three- and four-hole hitters.

The Sooners actually saw their overall team batting average improve from .307 last year to .313 this season, but the drastic drop in home runs may have contributed to OU’s collapse in the postseason, causing the team to miss out on a return trip to the College World Series in Omaha, Neb.

The national average for Division-1 teams was a .281 batting percentage, .52 home runs per game and a 4.76 ERA through the regular season.

The last time college baseball produced such low numbers was more than 30 years ago in 1975, when it switched to the aluminum bats it used up until this year.

After that first big change, teams didn’t fully adjust and start producing record-high numbers in offensive categories until 1998 after a long, gradual rise.

Power-hitting teams across the country, including Oklahoma, will have to put in extra time in the cages with hitting coaches to hash out the ins and outs of the new bats to eventually restore power to their lineups.