Metal baseball bats still help Little Leaguers hit a little better

Although designed to simulate wooden bats, USA Baseball’s metal bats are designed by regulation to be more forgiving than wooden bats for young players who may not hit the ball in the bat’s optimal “sweet spot.”

After researchers at Washington State University tested wooden bats and two types of metal bats with young players, they found that the launch velocity of a batted ball was up to 5% higher with metal bats than with wooden bats. When they analyzed the data, they found that the performance of USA Baseball’s metal bats at the sweet spot was similar to that of wooden bats. The difference was greater for less optimal hits.

“It’s a bigger disadvantage if you’re not in the sweet spot with wooden bats than with the other metal bats,” said Lloyd Smith, director of WSU’s Sport Science Laboratory and lead author of the study, which was published in Proceedings of the Institution of Mechanical Engineers, Part P: Journal of Sports Engineering and Technology.

Smith’s team worked with USA Baseball to develop a new wood-like metal bat standard. This study further investigated the performance of bats designed to meet this standard in the lab and in the field – compared to wood bats as well as the metal bats previously used in youth baseball, known as BPF 1.15.

The researchers had 52 players, with an average age of 12, take multiple swings with each type of bat in a batting cage, a total of more than 1,500 swings. Motion sensors were attached to the players, bats and balls to measure the speed of the swing and the exit velocity of the balls.

As expected, balls hit with the BPF 1.15 metal bats had higher launch velocities than the wooden bats, as these metal bats were no longer used in youth leagues due to their performance advantages. With USA Baseball’s standard bats, launch velocities were closer to those of the wooden bats, but were still higher on average. Data analysis showed that the difference was on hits outside of the bat’s best performance mark.

Metal bats were introduced into amateur baseball leagues in the 1970s, in part because wooden bats can break and become expensive over time. Players soon realized that the hollow metal bats offered an advantage through their “trampoline effect” – an advantage that grew as companies competed to make better bats. Recognizing the potential dangers and changes to the game that these metal bats posed, league officials began trying to curb it in the 1990s, eventually limiting the use of metal bats to those that performed similarly to wooden bats.

As this study shows, even with the USA Baseball bat, there remains a small performance advantage, but it is acceptable to officials. There are also good reasons for leagues and coaches to use them over wooden bats, Smith said. That performance advantage and their lighter weight can lead to better batting averages for young players, which can help leagues get kids excited about the game.

“Wood is still heavy. Part of baseball is hitting the ball far, but the other part is just hitting the ball,” he said. “If you have a heavy bat, it becomes harder to make contact because it’s harder to control.”

Despite the differences in batting performance in this study, batter skill was still the biggest factor in how fast the ball bounced off the bat. Smith stressed that if players really want to improve their batting average, they should improve themselves, not their bat.

“If you’re really trying to hit the ball far, you’re going to benefit a lot more from training and getting stronger, especially if you’re a young kid and growing fast. That’s going to have a much bigger impact on how hard you hit the ball than what club you buy,” he said.