History
The economic reason that it is feasible for companies to cut up bats is that collectors don't value complete bats enough. If the value of an unchopped Cobb bat were so high, the company would never have bought it in the first place or chopped it up in the second place. Put another way, the value that the market has put on some artifacts is for them to be in pieces as opposed to whole.
Who is to say that the market hasn't appropriately assigned the differing values between a complete bat and the wood chipped bat that will keep just the right number of game-used Cobb bats in tact?
I blame the demand, not the supply.
What if there were 100,000 Cobb-used bats out there -- would that make a difference? 10,000? 1,000? How many is too few so that they must all be spared? If you say that all Cobb bats should be saved regardless of how many are out there, then I think your view of the historical import of things is a bit skewed. There is no reason that society needs to preserve 1,000 baseball bats that were all swung by the same baseball player.
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