|
...the 1962 world championship was
finally determined by an otherwise perfect swing
of a bat which came to the collision 1 mm too high
to effect the transfer of title.
--Dr. Paul Kirkpatrick, "Batting
the Ball," Am.J. of Physics, 1963
Hitting a baseball has been
described as the single most difficult feat in
sports. And for good reason. Imagine the quality
of hand-eye coordination required to make contact
with a little white sphere traveling at over 95
miles per hour, using a 2 ¾ inch wide piece of
wood being swung at over sixty miles per hour.
Consider the intense concentration. A batter
standing just 56 feet from the pitcher's hand has
only about 45/100's of a second to decide if he'll
swing, predict where the ball will be, instruct
his muscles to move, and bring the bat to a point
of impact. If all goes well, the bat and ball
rendezvous a few inches in front of the plate.
The ball is crushed to half its diameter, springs
back, and is launched on its return flight at
speeds close to a hundred miles per hour. Timing
is essential. The difference between a hit over
second base and a foul near first or third is a
swing mistimed by 0.01 second. Baseball is the
only sport where being a failure seven out of ten
times is considered to be outstanding - only about
a dozen players in each major league bat .300
annually. A basketball center who sank only 30
percent of his baskets or a quarterback who hit
his receivers only 30 percent of the time would be
selling insurance instead.
Bat Speed
With these kinds of odds working
against a hitter, it's no wonder batters will try
anything to increase their chances of making solid
contact with the ball. Some pray. Others choke
up on the bat. But no matter what the technique,
the aim is the same: bat speed and control. Bat
speed is to a hitter what hamburgers are to
McDonald's; a batter lives or dies by how fast he
can whip that bat around. A hitter knows that to
make contact with a blazing fast ball or to follow
a sweeping curve, he has to be able to move his
bat quickly. For wood to meet leather, a hitter
must be able to accelerate his bat from its parked
position near his ear and drop it quickly down to
the strike zone near his waist, all in just a
fraction of a second. And the bat must be moving
fast enough at the moment of impact to drive the
ball out of the infield or out of the ballpark.
Bat speed is the essential, because as any
physicist will tell you, the faster the bat is
moving, the more energy is imparted to the ball.
Old-timers used to swing very heavy bats, thinking
that by swinging a heavy club they could knock the
ball farther. Babe Ruth's bat weighed a hefty 42
ounces. He once used a 52-ounce bat. He was able
to whip his bat around because of his exceptional
strength. But in the past thirty years, ball
players have discovered that bat weight is not as
important as bat speed. A medium-size bat is
already six times the weight of the ball. Making
it seven times heavier will hardly influence how
much momentum is transferred to the ball. But it
will slow down your swing considerably.
How is bat speed increased? Watch
the leadoff hitters, the small guys who must get
on base so the power hitters can drive them in.
Lead-off hitters need to be able to bunt, punch
they ball to the opposite field, or find the
"holes" in the infield, anything to yield a hit.
That means the need excellent bat control, and
good bat speed. These table-setters are very fast
but not usually very big. How do they
compensate? By "choking up" on the bat - sliding
their hands higher up on the handle. When the
thick end of the bat is brought closer to the
body, the bat becomes easier to swing. Great
hitters know, intuitively, that by choking up on
the bat they can swing faster and hit the fast
ball they might otherwise foul off. Not many of
them know the principles of physics that explain
why their techniques are successful.
Swinging a Bat like a Sledgehammer
The principles used by a baseball
player are the same ones a woodsman uses to swing
an ax or a sledge hammer. The useful weight of a
bat, like the head of a hammer, ax or golf club,
is concentrated in one spot: at the point of
impact. The farther your hands are from that
point, the more difficult it is to lift and
control the weight. Your wrists may wiggle just a
few inches, but the weighted end of the bat or
club will waggle many feet in response. In
effect, the shaft is really a long lever
magnifying your hand movements and exaggerating
the weighted end of the rod. That's why it's much
easier to pick up a sledgehammer by its head than
to grab it by the end of the handle. Golfers get
lots more control from short irons than from long,
driving clubs. The same is true of a bat.
Shorten the effective length by choking up and you
get better control of the weighted business end.
But there's a problem. A short bat
is not long enough to reach those fast balls on
the outside of the plate. A more permanent
solution is to use a lighter bat. When he broke
Babe Ruth's lifetime home run record, Hank Aaron's
Louisville Slugger weighed only 32 ozs. Roger
Maris favored a light bat in hitting his historic
61st homer. Today's young players moving up
through the ranks in high school and the minor
leagues use bats as light as 28 ozs. What makes a
bat light? Less wood. Since most of the wood is
concentrated on the fat end of the bat, most bats
are lightened by thinning the handles and
hollowing out the ends. These days,
unfortunately, lots of ballplayers are breaking
their skinny-handled bats and blaming the bat
companies for defective lumber. These hitters
claim that bats are being made with younger,
inferior wood, or from trees that have grown too
quickly. But batmakers say the wood hasn't
changed. It's still the same northern ash used
102 years ago. If the bat handles are getting
"sawed off" in players' hands or shattering into
splinters, it's because players are ordering bats
too thin to withstand the impact of a 90
mile-per-hour fast ball.
The Five-Hundred-Dollar Bat
What can be done to solve this
problem? The answer is to make the bats out of
something other than wood, a lightweight material
like aluminum. Today aluminum bats are standard
equipment in every ball club except those
in the major leagues. The official explanation is
that major-league baseball fears for the life of
the pitcher. As it stands now, a pitcher has just
enough reaction time to get out of the way of a
wicked line drive or to put up his glove to
protect himself. But a lighter, faster aluminum
bat would increase the speed of the ball enough to
overcome that margin of safety. Some pitchers
might get killed or have their careers ended if
hit in the head or the elbow. Willie Stargell,
the great Pirates hitter, was afraid of killing
the fans in the stands who wouldn't have enough
time to evade a line drive fouled off an aluminum
bat.
Of course, the unofficial reason is
that an aluminum bat would upset all the baseball
statistics accumulated over the past hundred
years, making objective comparisons between
players' performances impossible.
Major leagues aside, the wonderful
world of bats is not limited to just wood and
metal. New space age metals and composite
plastics are finding their way into baseball
bats. Thousands of amateur baseball and softball
players are now using a bat made of graphite,
glass, and plastic, the same stuff used to make
high-performance airplane wings. Made by the
Worth Bat Company in Tullahoma, Tennessee, the
composite bats are lighter and stronger than wood,
sound more like wood than metal on impact (no
aluminum "ping"), and have a "sweet spot" two or
three times larger than a wood bat has. The bats
are pricey, costing $55.00 to $90.00, but they may
last a lifetime. Worth's Harold Becklin claims
the bats, under normal use, are almost
indestructible. But that's not all. The hitters
of tomorrow will be able to choose their bats to
fit the hitting situation much like golfers choose
their clubs for each shot. Composite bats can be
tailor-made to enlarge or deaden the sweet spot.
Some bats, like golf woods, will be tuned to hit
the long ball. Others can be designed like short
golf irons for cheap hits that trickle past
scampering infielders.
While searching for the perfect bat
material, engineers have experimented with
everything from Fiberglas to bamboo to magnesium.
But there are limits inherent in each material.
The latest fiber-imbedded, space age metals, for
example, cost upward of $300.00 per pound. With
each bat requiring a pound and a half of raw
material for construction, the price of these bats
(not including manufacturing costs) is beyond even
the most diehard Sunday softballer.
Center of Percussion
There is something that can be done
to make the best use of the bat you have now, and
that is to find the best place on the bat to hit
the ball, the sweet spot. There are two sweet
spots, possibly three, depending upon whom you
ask. The first sweet spot is called the center of
percussion. It is the place on the bat where the
initial jar to your hands is at a minimum when you
hit the ball. It's the place where you feel a
"solid" hit has been made. If a ball strikes a
bat above or below this point, the bat will try to
swing around it. The result: The impact of the
ball will try to rip the bat from your hands. The
center of percussion is not ingrained in the wood
(or aluminum) of the bat but moves around
depending on where you fix your hands. For an
aluminum softball bat about 32 inches long, the
center of percussion is about 6.5 inches from the
fat end of the bat.
No Sting
Ever wonder why your hands "sting"
when you hit the ball? That's because you've hit
the ball on the wrong place on the bat. The
second sweet spot is the point on the bat where
your hands sting the least when bat meets ball.
Not to be confused with the center of percussion,
the "node" is the spot where a hit will cause no
lasting vibration. This point is about a quarter
of the length from the fat end of the bat. To
find the node, hold the bat by two fingers about
six inches from the knob and hit the bat at
various points.
The bat will ring at each point of
impact until you hit the node. The farther away
from the node that you hit the bat, the louder the
ringing will be. Aluminum bats ring a great deal
more; that's why they sting your hands more often.
Fastest Rebound Speed
The existence of a third sweet spot
is being hotly debated by sports physicists. This
is the point on the bat that, when struck, will
transfer most of the energy from the bat to the
ball - in other words, the spot where the speed of
the rebounding baseball is at a maximum. Many
sports physicists, such as Dr. Larry Noble of
Kansas State University in Manhattan, Kansas,
place that point at the center of percussion. Dr.
Howard Brody, a physicist at the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, disagrees. Brody
says this sweet spot - the impact point - is not
at the center of percussion but at a spot closer
to the handle than the other sweet spots on the
bat. This location, however, moves around
depending on the speed of the thrown ball, the
weight of the bat, and how "wristy" the swing is -
that is, whether the arms and shoulders or the
wrists of the player are more involved. Without
getting into complicated mathematics to prove his
point, Brody suggests that to give the ball
maximum rebound velocity you should try the
following:
1. Hit a
fast pitch closer to your hands for maximum
power. Hitting a slow
pitch farther out on your bat gets
best results.
2. When playing hardball,
where the weight of the bat is much greater in
proportion to the weight of the ball, hit the ball
father out on the bat. In softball, hit the ball
closer to your hands.
Sunday softballers can
decide for themselves from their own experience
whether or not the third sweet spot
exists.
..............................................................
TRIVIA: A baseball spends one-thousandth
of a second in contact with the bat.
To get the
strongest part of the wood on the ball, the bat
should be held with the trademark up (toward the
sky). The trademark is branded onto the flat
growth rings. Since the growth rings are the
strongest part of the wood, it's best for the ball
to hit the rings on edge. But Hall of Fame
catcher Yogi Berra refused to turn the label up.
Saying, "I don't come up to read but to hit," Yogi
always turned his label to the pitcher. Yogi
broke lots of bats.
....
Debate about the Ball: Does it
Really Curve?
A fast ball is not the
most difficult pitch to hit. Lots of players make
a living hitting good, major-league fast balls.
The pitches that give most batters a problem are
breaking pitches: curves, sliders, and
split-fingered fast balls. Baseball veterans
often say they knew they had to retire from the
game when they couldn't hit the curve balls
anymore. These baseballs don't overpower batters
like blazing fast balls; they hamstring players
who helplessly watch them dance across the plate -
hooking, tailing, dropping, and twisting in such
unbelievable ways that some batters are convinced
the sharp drop of a curve ball is really an
optical illusion or the result of the illegal use
of sandpaper to scuff up the ball. Batters would
like to believe that no human being could be
talented enough to cause a leather-covered,
five-ounce sphere to follow such an erratic
course. It just ain't natural. The curve-ball
controversy has been debated so intensely that in
1941, Life and Look magazines took
stop-action photographs of curve balls to
determine if the baseballs really did curve.
Life concluded the "evidence fails to show the
existence of a curve," while Look
discovered just the opposite: The ball did curve.
Even as recently as 1982, Science magazine
commissioned scientists at General Motors and MIT
to conduct a modern scientific investigation into
the question, and once again stop-action
photography was employed to show that a curve
ball's curve is not an optical illusion but is
based upon sound laws of physics. |
