Re: is a batter able to use the incoming pitch's speed to his advantage?

The rage in baseball is bat speed, but the batter can benefit from the pitcher throwing a faster pitch.
According to The Physics of Baseball written by Robert K. Addair a faster thrown pitch will be hit further for the same bat speed than a slower pitch.

Adair's example uses a bat 35 inches long and 32 ounces in weight swung 70 mph measured at the sweet with an inclination of 10 degrees above the horizontal (upper cut swing). In the extreme example of throwing a ball up and hitting it (fungo) versus a 90 mph pitch, a fungo shot is calculated to go 300 feet and the fastball hit will go 370 feet!!!

This effect can be seen in play all the time -- all the ridiculously long hit homers come on fastballs. For example, July 3, 1999, Jim Thome hit a fastball 511 feet at Jacobs Field off of Kansas City Royals pitcher Don Wengert. It was a colossal hit on a very nice (for hitting anyway) fastball.

Maybe a good analogy is the collision involved in throwing a ball off a wall. The faster the ball hits the wall, the faster and father it will come off the wall. The wall acts to reverse the direction of travel and since momentum is a vector quantity this means the momentum of the ball is also reversed. Some of the momentum of the ball is transfered to the wall, but because the wall has an infinitely bigger mass than the ball, the speed of the wall is minimal so it is perceived as not moving. Some energy is lost so the ball does not bounce back with the same speed (coefficient of restitution).

A typical adult baseball bat weights somewhere between 29 and 35 ounces. A regulation baseball will weigh in at 5 ounces. So the bat is at least 5 times heavier than the ball. If a batter can generate a bat speed comparable to the speed of the pitch then the bat will have about 5 times more momentum than the ball at the time of collision and very large amount of the collision energy will transfer to the ball and the momentum of the bat will be only slightly effected. If this supposition is true, then the collision of the bat and ball could be viewed as very nearly the same as the collision of a ball and wall.   Therefore a faster moving pitch can be hit farther than a slower pitch.

Sincerely,

Tom "Fly Out" Cull

[Moderator note: The massive bat is almost like a moving wall as far as the ball is concerned. This means that a 90 MPH pitch into a 70 MPH bat should give a rebound like you would get with a 160 MPH pitch into a wall.]