Why wooden bats are better than aluminum

We apologize for the inconvenience, but something went wrong with this page. You can try reloading the page by clicking here. Thanks for signing up and welcome to the team! Skip to main content Stop all automatic animation Skip to footer site map. Home Blog Baseball Bats. This allows the hitter to develop better mechanics. Improves Player Strength : Manufacturers craft wood bats with the intention of making them properly weighted.

The proper weight gives wood bats balance, which allows hitters to drive the ball. Contrastly, aluminum bats are intentionally light, which produces golf-like swings from metal bat hitters. Safer : Sure, wood bats can shatter, but aluminum bats increase the velocity of the ball off the bat tremendously.

Because of this, pitchers, infielders, and fans are put in harm's way with little reaction time. Player Advancement : Wood bats make a hitter better and, therefore, give the hitter a better chance at graduating to the next level of play.

It's harder to transition from metal to wood and wood bats develop skills, because the bat has a smaller sweet spot and improves swing speed. Again, the only published study todate which offers evidence of an enhancement in performance for metal bats due to an elastic property of the bat is the Crisco-Greenwald study. Figure 3 compares batted ball speeds for balls hit with a wood bat orange dots and the highest performing metal bat blue dots used in their study.

The horizontal axis Impact Speed represents the swing speed of the bat. Plotting the data this way normalizes the results so as to remove the effect of different moments-of-inertia see reason [1].

The figure shows that for a given swing speed, the metal bat can potentially hit the ball mph faster than the wood bat. This can be explained if the metal bat has a trampoline effect which returns more of the energy to the ball. They were not able to explain differences in this effect between the five metal bats they tested, and so could not explain how the trampoline effect improves performance.

During the Summer of I was granted access to the five metal bats used in their batting cage study. I measured the frequency of the mode of vibration in the barrel, called the hoop mode , which gives rise to the trampoline effect.

From my analysis of various hollow softball bats I have shown that the frequency of the hoop mode correlates pretty well with performance. Figure 4 shows the Bat-Ball Coefficient-of-Restitution which measures the combined elastic properties of the bat-ball system as a function of hoop frequency.

The solid curve is a theoretical prediction from my simple mass-spring model of the trampoline effect , and the data points represent the measured BBCOR values extracted from the original field study data by my friend and colleague Alan Nathan for the five metal bats used in the Grisco-Greenwald batting cage study.

The plot clearly shows that the higher performing bats have a lower hoop frequency, which indicates that the simple mass-spring model of the trampoline effect captures the essential physics. Figure 3. Evidence of an enhancement in performance due to an "inherent elastic property" of the bat.

Orange dots are for a wood bat, and blud dots are for a high performance metal bat. Figure 4. Performance of hollow metal bats is due to the trampoline effect. Bats with lower hoop frequency more compliant barrels have increased performance. The location on the bat where an impact results in the least sting is not always the same as the location where the ball comes off the bat the fastest. Many of the marketing ploys regarding the size of the sweet spot often refer to the perception that a given bat is more forgiving ie.

They found that the width of the sweet spot was nearly the same for all bats wood and metal bats tested. One of the priniciple conslusions of the Criso-Greenwald study is that for metal and wood bats with similarly sized sweet spots, the batted ball speed will be higher for the metal bat. During professional baseball games, wooden bats frequently break. This problem does not occur with metal baseball bats because they do not crack. They can also be dented and bent, so often they need to be replaced, but not nearly to the extent that wooden bats do.

It is also possible to make aluminum bats lighter than wooden bats. Due to the lighter weight of metal bats, baseball players can swing with more incredible speed than they could do with wooden bats. Not only does this mean they can get to pitches quicker, but with an aluminum bat, they can also produce more speed.

The aluminum bat has a larger sweet spot and the power gained from increased bat speed. Studies show that for balls strike with an aluminum bat, the ball speed is higher than those strikes with a wooden one. It sounds like there are better aluminum bats than wooden ones, so why are they not used in the MLB? Maintaining the accuracy of records is one factor.

If major leaguers turned to aluminum bats, production would surge, beginning to break all sorts of hitting records. Instead of advancements in technology, baseball players can excel based on good coaching and athletic ability. But because the walls of the bat are thin enough that they bend or flex when the ball hits the bat, the energy is then given back to the ball when the wall bounces back.

The ball travels farther. Manning says when the company began comparing statistics between wooden and aluminum bats, it found team batting averages went up about points and home run production almost doubled for teams with aluminum bats. In a game where statistics such as batting averages, slugging percentages, etc. The pros also want to show that athletic performance in the game is due to human ability and not bat technology.

There is also a legitimate concern about player safety because the ball is travelling so much faster.