TechStuff at the Bat

for a technology podcast. The O E. D. That being The Oxford English Dictionary defines technology as quote the application of scientific knowledge for practical purposes, especially in industry end quote. A baseball bat hardly seems to qualify on casual glance, but baseball is a big industry in of itself. In fact, according to Forbes, in two thousand seventeen, Major League base ball revenues were more than ten billion dollars. That was the first time in history that the league get hit

a number that high. And when you have that much money dedicated to an endeavor, more attention, care, and detail comes to bear on every aspect of that industry, including, as it turns out, the construction and design of baseball bats. And there's a lot of tech that goes into the making of a modern baseball bat these days, especially from the major manufacturers, and that's because baseball bats have become

something of a revered piece of equipment. In fact, I'd go so far as to say there's a lot of superstition that feeds into the way baseball bats are constructed. Once a player finds a little success with a particular type of bat, they're likely to stick with that model out of a belief that at least some of their success is due to the performance of their equipment. But bats don't last forever, so there has to be some way to replicate a particular bat as closely as possible.

When you're using a material like wood, that becomes challenging. So, as it turns out, this involves both advanced woodworking tools and a certain set of skills, as Leam Neeson would say, and it's certainly true that there are specific physics involved that make one bat different from another bat. So today we'll take a look at the history of the baseball bat, how bat size was eventually codified in the rules of baseball,

and how these bats are made today. So batter up first, a bit about the history of baseball because it is based on lies and deceit and lots of money, which I think is really cool. Back in the early nineteen hundreds, there was an apocryphal story that made the rounds regarding baseball's origins, and this was a response to a request

from a fellow by the name of Albert Goodwill Baulding. Spalding, whose name you might recognize if you've ever gone inside a sporting goods store, had played professional baseball in the eighteen seventies, and he was a pitcher. He was a high performing pitcher in the eighteen seventies, and he was reportedly one of the first players to use a baseball glove to help field the ball. He opened up a sporting goods store and became a part owner of the

Chicago White Stockings baseball team. He was also one of the founders of the National League of Baseball. But one thing kept gnawing in the back of his mind. Where did baseball actually come from? This question about the origins

of baseball didn't just pop up unprompted. Spalding's business published a journal called The Baseball Guide, and the editor of the Baseball Guide was a guy named Henry Chadwick, who wrote about what appeared to be the English roots of baseball, as in the country of England, baseball shared some similarities with some older games, like cricket, which had been around for quite some time, and a British game called rounders. Cricket, like I said, I've been around for for centuries in

some form or another throughout English colonies and territories. Rounders, however, which shared several similar rules without a baseball, was seen as something of a children's game. Little girls played rounders. This appeared to gall Mr Spalding, who couldn't stand the thought of the sport he had played and now supported, grew out of a child's game from England. He wrote a rebuttal for the Baseball Guide and disputed that something as American as baseball could have evolved from a schoolyard

game from England. He wanted some sort of definitive proof that baseball was through and through an American game played by Americans for Americans America, and so in the early twentieth century, Spaulding and his buddy Abraham G. Mills form an investigative body called the Mills Commission to look into the matter to call the body unbiased would be a flat out lie. Spalding stacked the commission with members who

shared his anti rounders, anti English sentiments. Sportswriter Henry Chadwick, who had written about those similarities between baseball and rounders, as I mentioned earlier, was pointedly not invited to participate, despite the fact that Spalding had but looked for chadwick support for the idea of a an investigative commission in the first place. So he goes to Chadwick says, Hey, maybe we have an investigative body look into this matter and and and see if there is any link between

rounders and baseball. And Chadwick says, yeah, that sounds it sounds reasonable. And then they specifically did not invite him to be part of this commission. Now, a fellow by the name of Abner Graves of Denver, Colorado, claimed to have the answers see the commission, published accounts in various newspapers across the country saying, do you have any evidence for the origins of baseball? Do you have stories, you have anything that can connect baseball to how it all

got started here in the United States? And this guy named Abner Graves sent in a response. Graves, who was a miner out in Denver, Colorado, wrote that when he was growing up in Cooperstown, New York, he witnessed the creation of baseball. He was there when it started. He says that it all came from the mind of a guy named Abner double Day. It was a good American lad who went on to fire the very first shot for the Union in the Civil War at Fort Sumter, and he rose to the rank of Major General of

volunteers during the war. According to Graves, double Day taught the game to local kids in Cooper Sound, New York, and he scratched out the diagram of a baseball diamond in the dirt, and later he drew it out on a piece of paper along with a bay six set of rules for the game, and thus claimed Graves was baseball born. It was the invention of a man who would go on to become a war hero for the

Union during the Civil War. Without bothering to really investigate these claims too much, the Mills Commission published a report stating that baseball was really definitely certainly American through and through, and that double Day had invented the game around the year eighteen thirty nine. Further, a Cooper's Town millionaire named Stephen C. Clark felt that tourism was the only industry that could save his hometown, which was suffering during the

Great Depression. A local farmer in Cooperstown, or near Cooperstown, actually just outside of it, discovered some of what were believed to be Abner Graves belongings in nineteen thirty five. This farmer was a relative of Abner Graves, and while going through one of the old houses, said, Hey, there's this trunk here, and it's got some stuff in it,

um some photographs, some letters. There's also a ball very similar to the type they've been used in the early days of baseball, which Clark jumped on as definitive proof that this story was absolutely gospel, and he decided to create a new destination in Cooperstown. He declared that the baseball that was discovered was an Abner double day baseball, and he began plans to build a baseball museum, with the whole venture anchored to the idea that Cooperstown was

the birthplace of the game. It would be ready to celebrate the centennial anniversary of baseball. According to the double Day story, which means that it would be ready in nineteen thirty nine. More on that in a second. Now, there are more than a few problems with Abner Graves's story. Problem No. One. In eighteen thirty nine, Abner Graves would

have been five years old. Abner double Day, the supposed inventor of baseball, would have been nearly twenty years old, and it seems unlikely that the two would have played together in a game of baseball. A twenty year old teaching a five year old how to play baseball in order to have an organized game of some sort does not seem very realistic. Problem Number two. In eighteen thirty nine,

Adner double Day wasn't in Cooperstown, New York. He was enrolled in West Point and didn't have leave to travel from campus until the summer of eighteen forty, and even then it was not for more than just a little bit more than a month. So Problem three. In all the surviving journals and papers that were written by double Day,

none of them mentioned baseball. In fact, the only connection to baseball with double Day at all seems to be that he once requested some sporting equipment during his service in the Union Army for the purposes of recreation for soldiers.

Problem number four. Alexander Cartwright Jr. Who was a founding member of the Knickerbocker Club in New York, was believed to be the person who drew out the structure of the Bay Baseball Diamond and wrote down the rules for the first time in and unlike the claim made by Graves, this claim actually had documentation to back it up. But the Hall of Fame is in Cooperstown, New York anyway. Now, thanks for indulging me and my love of history and

of flim flam. Next we're gonna talk about the evolution of the baseball bat and the physics behind whacking a baseball real hard. But first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So the earliest bats were really just sticks, sturdy, handy stick you could use to bat at a ball. Early baseball players would frequently whittle their own bats to suit their individual playing styles. Pictures, by the way, would end up constructing their own baseballs before

everything got organized and regulated. Before the game was structured enough to have the regulations about such things, bats could be of many different shapes and sizes. There were no guidelines saying they must be a certain length or smaller. Early baseball bats could be flat, they could be round, they could be long, they could be short, they could be fat. Bats also tend to be really heavy, because the common wisdom was if it's heavy, it'll make the

ball go farther when you hit it. I'll talk more about that in the next section when we get to the physics of baseball. Bat's, by the way, have a basic anatomy. The business end of a baseball bat is the barrel. That's the wider end. That's the part that you hit the baseball with, or at least you try to hit the baseball with if you're like me, it's the part that totally with when the baseball flies past me. At the other end is the handle That obviously is

the end that you hold onto and tada. That's your basic baseball bat anatomy. Players would either craft their own bats, or they would get a carpenter to make one for them, and sometimes they had to make do with makeshift bats.

According to Roy Kerr, who wrote the book Sliding Billy Hamilton's The Life and times of baseball's first great leadoff hitter, the Philadelphia Athletics once ran into a bit of trouble during a game way back in eighteen sixty five, when the team broke every single bat they had brought to the game. They continued the game by using a shovel

handle as their bat for the rest of play. In eighteen eighty four, a woodworker named j. A. Bud Hillaric attended a baseball game to watch his home team that would be the Louisville Eclipse and hit her Pete Browning stepped up to the plate. Now when he swung, he connected with the baseball, but he broke his bat during play. That inspired Hilaric to invite Browning back to Hillary's woodworking shop,

and he created a personalized bat for Browning. Browning went on to use that bat in a game the following day, and he got three hits. Apparently, Browning bragged to his fellow teammates about his new custom made bats and orders started pouring in. Hill Eric thus created a new brand of bats that's famous to this day, the Louisville Slugger.

By the end of the nineteenth century, baseball was starting to really coalesce as a truly organized sport, which meant rules were being laid down as to what could and could not be used with bats. The basic rules stated bats had to be round, so you couldn't have any more flat or angled bats. You know, bats that that had flat surfaces around them, like maybe a hexagonal bat. You couldn't do that. They had to be rounded. They could be no greater than two and three quarter inches

or six point nine centimeters in diameter. They could be no longer than forty two inches or about a meter in length, and they should be made entirely out of hardwood, though the handle could be wrapped in twine or some other material to aid in gripping. But they didn't have a limit on bat wait. Early bats were made out of hickory, but the trend moved towards using white ash as the wood of choice. It was a little bit

more durable and lighter than hickory was. That is until about two thousand one, because that's when Barry Bonds used a maple bat to set a single season record of seventy three home runs, which made maple a popular choice because clearly it was the bat that did all the work. Although to be fair, different woods do perform in different ways, and I'll talk more about that later. Uh, there are actual differences that can affect bat performance, so we'll we'll

cover it now. In fact, white ash, for example, is lighter than hickory, so it's easier to swing the bat faster or to adjust more easily two different pitches. Maple is more flexible than ash, so it creates kind of a whip like motion that can impart some extra force on a ball when you make contact. But maple can

also shatter more readily. That has actually prompted Major League Baseball to put a ban on softer types of maple wood, and also requires bats to have a barrel of no more than two point six one or six point six centimeters in diameter, so, in other words, they have to be less thick now than they used to be in order to limit the bat designs because you were having more and more bats that had a disproportionately thin handle

compared to the barrel. It really helps cut down on some of the weight, but that meant that the amount of force that would happen when a bat collided with a ball could sometimes be enough to shatter the bat, to snap the handle and send shards everywhere. Maple is particularly bad about this and that can be actually dangerous for people on the field, so there's been some limitations on the bat width in order to decrease the likelihood

of that happening. These days, professional players have six different woods they can choose from for their bats. For Major League Baseball, they include white ash, sugar maple, true hickory, yellow birch, red oak, and Japanese ash. Most bats, however, are either sugar maple or white ash. So let's walk through the journey of making a Louisville Slugger white ash baseball bat, because the whole thing is pretty fascinating and

there are differences. You can buy bats from local bat manufacturers and they tend to follow a very similar approach, but usually they have less automation. They have a lot more hand crafting going into their bats. But generally speaking, this is the process. You start with a white ash tree that's at least fifty years old, so it is the right stature for you to start off with. The white ash and Louisville Sluggers comes from special forests in

New York and Pennsylvania. So you cut down the tree, you remove the branches, you saw, the trunks into logs and those logs need to be ten to sixteen ft long or about three to five meters, and then you load those logs onto a truck and take them to a mill. The wood passes an inspection, so you look at the wood. You're looking for any imperfections that would affect back quality, things like knots in the wood or any rotting or anything like that. The logs that pass

inspection go through a hydraulic wedge. The hydraulic wedge cuts the logs into splits that are about forty uh wide. So the splits then go into a lathe, and a lathe is a device that rotates whatever you're working on about an access of rotation so that you can do some sort of operation on it. Um Usually lathes will turn things fairly rapidly, and it's a frequent tool in woodworking.

Lathes have been around for ages. So old lathes were ones that used ropes and gears and a treadle like a foot pedal to operate, and you would press down on the foot pedal it would pull down on a rope that would turn some uh gears and that would rotate the lathe and you would just do that over and over again. You would just keep pedaling in order to continue the rotational motion of whatever it was you're working on, and you would be able to smooth out

surfaces this way. These days, of course, we have lathes that are connected to motors. The motors will turn at a pretty high rpm so that you can work on uh the wood and very rapidly start to shape it. Now that's only part of a lay. The other part is whatever tools you're using to shave down the wood, and that might be handheld, it might be part of a lathe where you just place it in the right position.

It might even be fully automatic. But this is the hard surface that presses against the wood and shaves off, uh the outer layers. So as the wood rotates, it gets shaved down further and further right. So with the splits you put them in the lathe. You turn the splits around and around and around. The lathe will start to smooth off the corners rough edges of these splits.

And once you do that, you end up with a length of wood that's called a billet b I l l e T. And the billets go through another inspection process, including weighing to make sure that they are still appropriate for bats, and based upon how much they weigh, they're gonna go toward different models of bats. Some wood is going to be more dense than others, and that means it's going to be heavier than others, and that may mean that it's better for one type of bat than another.

More on that in a second. Now, when you've got these billets, you're not even ready to start with the batmaking process yet. Nope, you've got to spend some time first. Typically you would coat both ends of the billets, the cut ends with a preservative to keep it from rotting or or otherwise deteriorating, and then you season the billets.

Now by seasoning, i'm talking about drying them out so they're considered to be green wood at this stage because the billets still contain sap and gum inside the wood. So seasoning is the process of letting these billets dry out over a very long period of time so that sap and gum leech out of the wood over time. Usually this takes between six months and two years before you're ready to actually take the next step. One. Seasoned,

the billets are weighed again. That helps determine which model a bat The billets might be used for bat models are based off of older bats that players have favored. So you design a bat players like it, you say, well, this is going to serve as a model for future bats. I'm gonna design more bats to try and replicate the same design that we've created here, which could be tricky because again, wood density might be different, So you might end up creating a bat that's the exact same physical

dimensions but ways slightly different from and the model. Uh, there are different ways you can take two avoid that. I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. But it's tough to do because wood is an organic material. It's not like you can produce it chemically to be exactly the same and just pour that into a mold and get the exact same bat time after time after time. With wood, you're dealing with nature, and nature does not

always replicate things exactly. Now, when it comes time to make the bat, you put the billet in another lathe, not a big surprise. An operation like Louisville Slugger has automatic lathes that can cut a billet into the rough shape of a bat. So you put it in this lathe. It holds the billet by either end. To think of it like a spike that sticks into the ends of this billet, rotates it around and around super fast, and this automatic machine ends up shaving away all the parts

of the billet that don't look like a rough bat shape. Now, even then, this is just the basic shape of a bat. It's not close to your final format. Next would UH use a a human operator called a bat turner to do all the final shaping, the fine tuning that will turn this basic bat shape into an actual model of a bat that you are are using as your reference points.

So typically you would have a reference model of the type of bat you want to make nearby, typically mounted behind the lathe, and you would use tools like calipers to measure how wide the model is at specific reference points, and then you would continue to shave away at this bat shaped piece of wood until it matched those measurements. So you'd use the calipers and take a very precise

measurement of say the base of the handle. Well, you want to make sure that you shave the wood away in your billet of wood until it's that same same diameter, and the same is true for the entire length of the bat. You want to make sure you get all the curves properly designed. You want to make sure that the barrel of the bat is the same diameter as the original model. So this is a pretty delicate approach.

If someone who has a practiced hand at it can do it fairly quickly, but anyone else it looks like magic. I've watched a lot of videos of bat turners doing this, and to me, it is really stress inducing because I think of how easy it would be to make a mistake that would ruin the bat that you're working on, and you would have completely wasted a billet if that happened.

But the folks who do this, they're very highly skilled, and they're they've done it hundreds of times, and so they do this very quickly and confidently in a way that kind of what I'm both impressed by and terrified by, honestly. And eventually you get to a point that the bat

you're working on as resembles the model as closely as possible. Now, if the weight is not quite right, if let's say that your billet bat, the one that you've just created, the brand new replica, let's say it's a little too heavy, you can actually shave a little bit off by making a divot in the top. In fact, use essentially a drill press is what it ends up being to carve out a hollow section at the end of the barrel.

This is typical for most baseball bats in Major League Baseball, they have a hollow section at the very end, and you can use that to fine tune the weight a little bit. Uh. Same thing is true at the the bottom of it. They call this caping. When you cape a bat, you're you're creating this little hollow section at the ends, and the bat itself is still solid all the way through. It's just the very ends that have

the little hollowed out sections. So then the bat has to be branded with the logo of the bat manufacturer, and the brand goes on a very specific place on the bat. You don't just put it anywhere. You actually place it on the flat of the woods grain on the bat. That's the weakest spot on the bat, and that serves as a guide for the player. You put the brand there to tell the player, Hey, this is

the weakest spot on the bat. You don't want to hit a baseball with this spot because it could make the bat break Instead, what you would do is you do essentially a quarter turn either up or down on the bat, so that the logo is facing either down or up, and then you would have the sweet spot of the bat. The bat, the part of the bat where it's the strongest, where it's going to impart the most energy to the baseball, et cetera. So that sweet

spot I'll talk more about in just a second. Even a well made bat, one that's made by experts, will not last forever. The average baseball bat and professional baseball

has a life expectancy of about a month. So you think of all the different baseball players out there, all of whom have their own preference for bats, and you think about how many duplicates you're gonna need because of the length of a baseball season, not to mention the fact that there's the possibility of breakage, and you start coming up with a lot of bats just for Major League baseball, let alone all the other types of baseball

out there. So it's fascinating to me that the process still uses a lot of human work that's not so automated that there's just a machine that's carving these things out. Because that's a lot of baseball bats. Y'all. We'll have more to talk about, especially with the physics of baseball, in just a minute, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. When you strike a ball with a bat, first of all, you're a better player than I am, but you are transferring momentum from the

bat to the ball. Momentum is the quantity of motion of a moving body, and we quantify this by multiplying the objects mass times its velocity. So the more massive something is and the faster it is moving in a certain direction, the more momentum it has. These days, a baseball is supposed to have a mass of between a hundred forty two and one grams, so I'm gonna take one as a happy medium. The average fastball pitch has a speed of around ninety miles per hour, or about

a hundred forty five kilometers per hour. Now that means the ball is traveling at about forty point three meters per second. That gives our average baseball momentum at five point eight four kilos per second, presumably toward the batter. Because velocity is a vector, it has to have a definition, so we're assuming you're actually pitching toward a batter when you're throwing a ball like that. Now, let's consider a

baseball bat. The average professional baseball players swing, according to Patrick Serveny, who actually studies such things, is around seventy miles per hour or about one kilometers per hour, meaning it's at about thirty one point four meters per second. So that's moving slower than the baseball. If the bat had the same mass as the ball, and we didn't have to factor in the player at all, the ball would transfer momentum to the bat and the bat would

go backward. The ball would keep going forward a little bit, but at a slower velocity. But the bat is heavier than the ball, and it's more massive than the ball. Not to mention, it's connected to a baseball player who has mass as well, but we're ignoring the baseball player

for this quick rundown. The average baseball bat mass is about point nine six kilograms, So the momentum a baseball bat has, again ignoring the presence of the actual player, would be about thirty point one four four kilograms meters per second. That's much larger than the baseball's five point eight four kilograms per meters per second. By the way, the moment of contact is incredibly short. It lasts about point seven milliseconds. At that moment, the baseball deforms, it

flattens a bit from the collision. If you've ever watched really super slow motion video of a bat hitting a baseball, you'll see the baseball it flattens out and the bat also deforms a bit. It flexes backwards and the bat compresses due to this contact. Now, if you can swing a heavier bat with the same velocity, you're going to get a bigger transfer of momentum to the ball and make it travel with a greater exit velocity. Because again,

momentum is mass times velocity. So if you increase the mass and you keep the velocity the same, you get greater mounts of momentum. Eventually, however, you'll find that the weight of the bat is slowing down your swing, so your velocity is decreasing, and that means that your amount of momentum will be affected. If the velocity decreases enough, then the added mass doesn't actually help you when you're

transferring momentum to the ball. And Babe Ruth was known to swing around a bat with a hefty mass of one and a half kilograms or fifty four ounces. Now that wouldn't play so well today, not because the rules, but because of the style of play. With all the different types of pitches out there, you need a lighter bat so that you can adjust your swing style to

hit the ball. The University of Arizona engineering professor Terry Baale found in his studies that a bat weighing thirty one to thirty two ounces or eight to nine seven grams is ideal for most professional players. So finding the right bat is something of both in art and a science. So there's no wonder that players can be particular about their bats. Now, as I said before, the calculations I

gave only took the bat and ball into consideration. Clearly, you've got a player to think about two and that's going to change things up. Since the bat is effectively an extension of the player, and the players form and follow through as they swing is going to affect how a struck ball will behave. In addition, there is a spot on the bat called the sweet spot that plays a factor. Now, I have to admit when I first heard the term sweet spot, my skepticism kind of popped up.

It sounded to me like almost like a superstition, like, oh no, there's this one spot on the bat that's perfect. But actually, as it turns out, the sweet spot is a thing sort of. Now. The reason I say sort of is because sweet spot is a poorly defined term, and depending on how you define it, it could be on a totally different part of the bat. Dr Daniel A. Russell of Pennsylvania State University wrote a full paper for the Acoustical Society about the sweet spot of a hollow

baseball or softball bat. Now that that's different from major League baseball bats, but let's go with this for a second. He pointed out that identifying a sweet spot is tricky because there are different ways to define what a sweet spot is. For example, bowl you could say the sweet spot is the location on the bat where a player is able to transfer the maximum amount of energy to

a ball. That makes sense, right, like, this is the one spot in the bat where if you can hit the ball right there, you, because of physics, you're going to be able to transfer the most amount of energy. It's the most efficient spot on the bat where you can hit a baseball. However, there's also a spot that

would create the least vibrational sting in a player's hands. Now, obviously that would be more important if you're using, say an aluminum bat, which can create these pretty powerful vibrations that can really hurt if you're hitting the ball at a certain point on the bat. And the problem is the location for those two different types of sweet spots are in two different places on your average bat, and it depends a lot on the bat in question. There's not like an easy formula you can use that will

tell you exactly where on all bats the sweet spot is. Now, Dr Russell made a compromise and said the sweet spot needs be a point on the barrel of the bat that exerts the most energy while creating the least amount of vibrational sting possible, And according to his studies, that would be a point approximately five to seven inches from

the end of the barrel. So if you take the barrel side of a baseball bat and measure back about five inches, that would be the start of the sweet spot, and go back another two inches that would be the end of the sweet spot. So you'd want to hit a baseball somewhere in that zone in order to impart the most energy to the ball and to avoid the

vibrational sting that will make your hands hurt. The paper goes into great detail of his methodologies that's putting it lightly for determining this, and it explains that even this definition is somewhat limited. I urge anyone interested in acoustics and baseball to give it a read, as it gets super technical and going into it further here would eventually reveal my own limitations when it comes to FIZ six. But I assume some of you out there are super

interested in physics and would like to read more. So the paper's title is The Sweet Spot of a Hollow Baseball or softball Bat, and it's available online. You can read the whole thing, and it's pretty interesting. In professional baseball,

bats again are supposed to be of solid hardwood. Now, there have been a few controversies in the past involving players using bats that have a cork center, which, at least in baseball lore, is supposed to make the bats lighter and easier to swing, and supposedly provides more bounce in contact with a ball, making it livelier. This is the so called trampoline effect. Uh Sammy Sosa was found using such a bat in the two thousand three season,

and that caused a huge scandal. But while a corked bat will be lighter than one made of solid hardwood, because cork is a lightweight material, does it really create the trampoline effect? Is it really making it more spongy? Well? Alan Nathan, a physics professor at the University of Illinois, decided to look into this scientifically, and he took a essentially a cannon that would fire baseballs at different bats,

some of which had corked centers. According to his team's tests, balls bouncing off a corked bat in a controlled environment actually left the bat at a lower velocity than balls that hit a solid bat, So in fact, they were traveling at a slower speed when they bounced off, and

that would mean that they would travel not as far. Right, Like if you swung a corked bat and you made contact with a ball, and then you swung a solid bat and you made contact with the ball and everything else was equal, the corked ball or the cork bat version would not go as far according to the findings that Alan Nathan's team discovered, So the trampoline effect, according

to us, his experiment was non existent. Further, the lighter weight of a corked bat would mean the bat wouldn't have as much mass in that transfer of momentum we talked about earlier, So unless your swing was sped up significantly, you would end up transferring less energy to the baseball because you're using a less massive baseball bat. Well, a court bat would therefore not provide any sort of advantage when it comes to batting power. However, there could be

another advantage. That advantage is that a player can actually wait to start a swing a little bit later. With a lighter bat, they don't have to engage the swing earlier. Now, one of the things about about mass is that you know it's has inertia, so to go from rest to motion requires energy. And then the more massive an object is,

the more energy it requires. So if you're using a heavy bat and so on throws a pitch, you have less time to decide how you want to swing that bat before it gets too late, because it takes more time for you to swing the bat and get it up to the speed you need in order to whack that ball and get a home run. If you have a lighter bat, then you can wait a little bit longer and suss out where that ball is going. No, that's pretty important in a world where we have all

sorts of different pitches. Back in the Babe Ruth days, pitching was not the art form that it is today, So you could swing a heavier bat and feel fairly confident that you can make contact with a good pitch. These days, it's a lot more tricky, So a lighter bat might give you the advantage. So you may not hit home run as easily, but you might hit more frequently.

Your batting average could go up as a result, and if you're swinging hard enough, you might be able to overcome the limitations of the less massive nature of your corked bat, if in fact it were allowed. But it's against the rules. So if you're a major league baseball player, don't use a cork bat. It will come back to haunt you. So that's the science and technology behind baseball bats. Now, I didn't go into aluminum bats. Really, that's a different

manufacturing process. It is fascinating and maybe in some future episode I'll cover the production of various types of sporting equipment in tech Stuff, and I'll cover aluminum bats in that one, I just didn't feel like it was uh gonna fit in today's episode. It would have made this episode a little too long, so I left it out

on purpose. But I really wanted to concentrate on the bats that are allowed in Major League Baseball, So that made it easier because I just looked at the ones that are made off of that would um So someday I might go back and talk about aluminum bats, but not today. If any of you have suggestions for topics you would love for me to cover on Tech Stuff, whether it's a technology, a company, a person in tech.

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