whats seems like a contradiction to me. Why is it that a large girl with seemingly slow bat speed can hit one a mile but a small kid with seemingly super bat speed has very little power ? Why is this ? MD
From Dr. Russells site
http://www.kettering.edu/~drussell/
"Before you run out to purchase a new bat with lowest moment-of-inertia you can find in order to increase your bat-swing speed in hopes of hitting balls faster, there is a catch. It is true that lower MOI translates to higher bat-swing speed, and that higher bat-swing speed results in higher batted-ball speed. However, a gain in batted-ball speed only results if you are
swinging the same bat faster. Swinging a lower MOI bat faster does not resulting in a faster batted-ball speed. This is because the effectiveness of the collision between bat and ball depends on the MOI of the bat, and a lower MOI bat produces a less effective collision with the ball. If the bat-swing speed is held constant, a bat with a lower moment-of-inertia produces a less-effective collision with the ball such that the batted-ball speed actually decreases for the lower MOI bat. In fact, when a player switches to a lower MOI bat, the increase in batted-ball speed due to higher swing speed is almost exactly cancelled out by the reduction in batted-ball speed because the lower MOI bat impacts the ball less effectively. I discuss this trade-off between higher bat-swing speed and lower collision efficiency in my article on the
BESR and MOI performance standard for NCAA baseball bats. The trade-off between bat-swing speed and collision efficiency due to changes in moment-of-inertia is also the reason that
corking a bat may help a player increase his batting average, but will not enable him to hit more home runs."
This is why we use the Swing Speed Radar units to determine bat speed and then work on certain aspects of the swing to determine what affects how fast we can swing the bat and how accurate our hand path is to the ball....as I like to say sometimes it comes down to technique verses brute force and when you can prove it it is difficult to argue with. We did this when we were at the ICE clinic a month ago and several coaches and parents saw the factors that affected bat speed and when we focused on those aspects they saw the bat speed increase as much as 10 to 15 MPH.