freddy77 posted:
Stats,
Good anecdote. But the fact is that 20 years ago most college players swung minus-5's even though minus-3's were available. Huge sample size. The players "voted" minus-5.
My anecdote:
A friend of mine led his HS conference with 10 home runs back in the early 1980's. I recently complimented him on that. He replied, "Yeah, well I was swinging a minus-8!"
Another:
"Two years ago, [2003] Frank Thomas started using an aluminum bat in batting practice. ... Major League Baseball told Thomas and the team to stop when fans entered the park.
'He was hitting the ball so hard that once the gates opened, people were really in danger,' Walker says. 'The ball came off the aluminum bat so fast, they sent up word we had to quit.' "
My son pitched his 1st HS Fall Ball game at 13 in 1999. By the time he finished pitching in college in 2006, he had thrown against some of the hottest bats ever produced. But it wasn’t the drop weight that made them hot, it was the construction of the bats. They were literally trampolines that shot the ball off them.
My anecdote. My boy pitched from 1995 thru 2006. He got a broken arm by getting hit by a pitch, a couple broken toes from getting stepped on covering 1st, a broken finger from getting hit with a thrown bat while in the on deck circle, a cracked rib from a collision covering home, and scores of minor cuts and abrasions like every other ball player who lasts that long. But in all that time, in about 500 innings of pitching, he never once got as much as a black and blue mark from a hit pitch. 