Finding and understanding the sweet spot on a wooden bat.
When you strike a bat against a ball it sends vibrations, much like the vibrations acting on airplanes or bridges, which travel in waves through the bat. This motion is important to understand because every vibration the bat experiences takes energy away from the ball's speed as it leaves the bat.
If you hit the ball at a bat's "nodes", the frequencies (each bat vibrates at several low and high frequencies at once, which is like the harmonics of stringed instruments) cancel out and since this happens you don't feel the sting in your hands that you experience when you hit the ball at different points on the bat.
There is some discrepency of where the sweet spot is on the bat. Some believe that the sweet spot is 17 inches from the end and others believe that it is 6 inches from the end. For a wooden bat, I tend to believe that the sweet spot is 6 inches from the end of a 34 inch bat (opposite of where your hands are). This is due to the fact that if you were to hit a ball 17 inches from the end, you would be hitting on the bat's emblem. If hit hard enough, the bat would break because this is a weak spot in the bat due to the stamping of the emblem.
It's Basic Physics
When looking at a collision between a baseball bat and ball, three things always apply:
Conservation of linear momentum-
The linear momentum of a particle of mass, m, moving with a velocity, v, is defined to be the product of the mass and velocity: p=mv
Elastic collision-
An elastic collision between two objects is one in which total kinetic energy (as well as total momentum) is the same before and after the collision.
Conservation of energy-
Energy can never be created or destroyed. Energy may be transformed from one form to another, but the total energy of an isolated system is always constant.
Newton's Third Law-
States that for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.
How hitting the ball works
The Swing
When a person swings a bat, their arms propel the bat to a high velocity which is needed to transfer momentum to the ball and send it sailing. Also, there is a transfer of energy starting with the batter then moving from the batter's arms to the bat and then when contact is being made with the ball the energy in the bat is transferred to the ball which propels the ball forward (hopefully:)) The force that acts on the ball, as contact is being made (contact is about 1/1000sec.
Or maybe alloy bats and composite bats The middle of the ball is called the “Cork”. The core of the ball is made of long fiber kapok, in 2004 high-visibility yellow optic covering. Alloy bat son the other hand, are thinner and have more responsive barrels. Alloy bats are also more durable because they are made of aluminum. Composite bats are made of a carbon fiber,graphite, and fiberglass, and some also have kevlar. Kevlar is a synthetic fiber of high tensile strength used especially as a reinforcing agent in the manufacture of tires and other rubber products and protective gear such as helmets and vests. There are many different parts of the bats which is a big part to make the player and who they are on the field. There is a knob which is the very base of the bat. Directly above that there is the grip for the players so they can grip the bat on the handle. Above the grip there is the barrel of the bat where the ball hits, it is also the thickest part of the baton top of that is the end cap on the end of the bat.
The game of baseball can be divided into three broad categories: hitting, pitching, and defense. No other facet of the game gets as much attention as hitting. For example, every year the MLB puts on a home run derby. No other part of the game draws as much attention. The traditional statistic that measure hitting ability is batting average (BA or AVG). To find a players batting averag...
Many people might think that swinging the bat straight through the ball would be enough to hit the ball a decent distance off the bat. There's many more mechanics involved in the swinging process. Muscle has only a small part to play in the swinging a bat for power. There are two types of mechanics involved while swinging a bat, Linear and Rotational. Rotational mechanics are the dominant source of power in the swing. Out of the rotational mechanics come the two forces that help generate the speed and power of the swing, torque and the other comes from the energy of rotation. Speed from the energy of rotation comes from the path that your hands follow as you swing the bat. The speed generated by the circular rotation from your hands is like a ball at the end of a string, as long as your hands are moving in a circle then the ball continues to accelerate in a circle. So the bat will also move in at an increasing speed as long as your hands are following a circular path as you swing. Any foward movement of the hands or body in a straight line won't add to the overall bat speed.
The first reason is, softball players have less time to react to the ball while batting and fielding. Softball fields are closer and smaller than baseball fields. Baseball infields are 16,700 feet and softball infields are only 7,200 feet. This leaves softball players in the infield, outfield and the batters with less time to react to a pitch or a hit. The distance from home plate to the pitcher's mound in softball is 43 feet while in baseball it is 60 feet. Sarah Trifoso plays for the Niagra Purple Eagles
For as long as I have been around aluminum bats, there has always been the question of safety. Each year we hear about a college pitcher being injured from a line drive off of an aluminum bat. Some say this is because the aluminum bats allow the ball to come off the bat quicker, but studies have shown that the exit speeds' of the balls coming off a wood and aluminum bat are nearly the same. This leaves the Moment of Inertia (MOI) as a possible cause. The MOI is simply where the weight is based in the bat. Wood bats can have the exact same MOI therefore causing the same so-called injuries that the aluminum bats cause (Russell). There has also been a study which compared the number of injuries in the NCAA and the Cape Cod League occurring from wood bats and aluminum bats (Douglas). The study showed that there are in fact more injuries caused from wood bats than aluminum. Most of the wood bat injuries were from thrown or splintered bats in which some resulted in serious injury. Rick Helling knows all too well about the injuries wood bats can cause. Helling, who was pitching for the class AAA Nashville Sounds last year, threw an inside pitch to a batter and shattered his bat which caused a jagged 8 inch shard of the bat to be impaled in his arm. The incident was so gruesome one of his teammates fainted. Recently there have been more injuries occurring such as Helling's which involved a wood bat than those involving aluminum.
It’s a Sunday afternoon and the whole family is over at grandmother’s house playing a fun game of pickup baseball until they realize they do not know how to hit a baseball. Luckily, it is a rather simple process that can easily be taught and learned. Hitting a baseball is not nearly as hard as it seems. Professional baseball players make hitting a baseball either look very easy or extremely hard. To begin the process, the following items are needed: a bat, a baseball, and baseball gloves so that the hit baseball can be caught.
This is where the problem arises. One would think that in today’s world, safety would be of the upmost importance; resulting in numerous, high quality, scientific, safety studies. However, despite the high level of controversy over the safety of metal bats due to the batted ball speed, few scientific studies have been conducted to compare the batted ball speed di...
Have you ever wondered how baseball players are able to crush 400 foot homeruns? It takes years and years to perfect a baseball swing to be able to do that. Swinging a bat and hitting a baseball is a lot more difficult than most people think. The pros make it look so easy because they have to perfect many mechanics just to hit a ball hard on the sweet spot of the bat. “Hitting is the single most difficult thing to do in sport.” this coming from Ted Williams, one of the greatest hitters of all time. Hitting a baseball requires more mechanical precision compared to other sports (Williams).
Throwing a baseball is a lot like throwing any other object. Children grow up throwing things around the house, and it very similar to how you throw a baseball. From a young age, I grew up throwing objects around the house. My father was smart enough to recognize this trend and sign me up for baseball later on when I was much older. To throw a baseball you first need to understand the shape of the object. The baseball has seams around the circumference which are placed around the outer edges of the baseball for added grip. Before we get into the types of pitches and grips, we need to understand the arm and body movement. The movement of your body and arms happens in many steps that follow a fluid form to increase accuracy
type of energy is lost or gained, and whether or not a factor that is
Ever wonder why a curveball or slider moves how it does. This is a very important pitch as it can cause the hitter to react as if it is a fastball but will then break away from the barrel of the bat. There are many things that go into making these pitches move.
When the first ball collides with the second, the first ball stops, but its momentum isn't lost,it is transferred to the second ball, then the third, then the fourth, until it reaches the very last ball. You can see this conservation of momentum as the last ball swings into the air with nearly the same momentum as the first ball, so if two balls are lifted into the air on one end of the cradle and released, then two balls on the other side will swing in response.
The motions of throwing, batting, and fielding will be presented in physics terms and ideas. Physics plays a big role in sports. One particular sport is softball, where we will be seeing different motions represented.
...the more energy is lost and the less the ball bounces back. The less denting that occurs, the more energy is kept and the higher the ball bounces back.