The Education Department is rebuffing a City Council effort to ban non-wood baseball bats in games where schools sponsor adolescent players, arguing that evidence suggests the metal bats are not only just as safe as traditional bats but they also make for better baseball.

The education official who oversees the Public Schools Athletic League, Martin Oestreicher, said baseball is among the league’s safest sports, with 30 injuries in 2003. A citywide changeover from metal to wood bats would cost $253,000, but he said the city would switch if wood proves demonstrably safer.

The ban’s supporters say they don’t want to wait.

“We have not had a young man die in New York City yet, but why is it that there always has to be a victim first before we act?” the sponsor of the bill, minority leader James Oddo of Staten Island, said. “Why is it that we never take the necessary steps to prevent the tragedy? Megan’s Law. Jenna’s Law. Kendra’s Law. VaSean’s Law. Louis’s law. Christopher’s law. I can go on all day.”

Mr. Oddo has been lobbying for bat bills in the City Council, so far unsuccessfully, since at least 2001, and similar efforts have been debated in legislatures across America. A bill to ban metal, titanium, and composite bats from children younger than 18 passed a New Jersey Assembly committee last week but still needs approval by the Senate and the full Assembly.

Debbie Patch of Montana, whose 18-year-old son Brandon died in 2003 after a ball struck by a metal bat hit his head, sobbed as she pleaded with lawmakers during the nearly six-hour hearing to ban non-wood bats.

Deaths like Brandon’s are tragic but rare, the director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Frederick Mueller, testified.

Professor Mueller said that between 1989 and 2005, less than one amateur baseball player in a million suffered a catastrophic injury — which includes death, permanent disability, and serious injuries.

“It’s awful, but those injuries are going to happen,” Mr. Mueller said after the hearing. Referring to Brandon Patch, he said, “They don’t know if that kid would have lived if that was a wood bat.”

Bat industry representatives, who paid for Mr. Mueller’s flight to New York, testified against the ban.

Aluminum bats provide hitters with performance advantages and prepare them for college competition, Mr. Oestreicher said. A brief prohibition more than a decade ago led to “a stunning drop in offensive performance.”

Still, the lawmakers urged the committee to choose caution over varsity athletes’ self-esteem.

“There’s some sort of whole thing going on here to make sure that kids get hits,” Council Member Simcha Felder of Brooklyn, who confessed that he was a “terrible” young baseball player, said.