Re: Physics of cheating in baseball

One of my favorite books The Physics of Baseball by Adair has a section devoted to "abberate bats." He directly addresses corking a bat and describes a few experimental measurements that were performed.

The basic hope in modifying the bat is to get more energy into the batted ball. One hope is to make the bat more springy in some way. Adair found that a bat with a hole drilled into the end of the bat seemed to provide a possible advantage, but the sound it gave off clearly indicated that it had been tampered with which is illegal. Adding cork, did not provide any measurably significant advantage.

Another thought on corking a bat (or doctoring it in anyway) is to lighten the bat for the same surface area and length. In my opinion, the biggest advantage to a lighter bat is the ability to weight slightly longer before committing to a swing because a lighter bat is easier to accelerate. While the kinetic energy of the bat is equal to 0.5 m v ² the energy transferred to the ball is a complicated (i.e. not fully understood), function of bat speed, mass, batter's technique, point of contact, and a couple other things -- so a straight lightening of the bat may not be completely advantageous.

To improve a batter's chance of driving the ball for distance, the bat must have a large area called a "sweet spot" that gives the most energy to the ball. Modifying a wooden bat by corking or drilling or pounding nails into it does not typically give rise to a bigger and better sweet spot.

Switching the bat to a different material is usually very effective, but in the Major League bats must be made of ash.

I have played softball with some very bizarre bats -- water filled, crooked handle, bottle barreled, power core, end loaded, titanium, aluminum, cooper alloys, micro-thin walled, and many others. All of these variations were highly touted has the best bat for distance. A couple of them I liked better and a few I thought were just a waste of money.

Sincerely,

Tom "Softball Until I Die" Cull