The only problem I have with LLIs article is when they talk about the BESR standard. The following is a link to THE white paper.
http://webusers.npl.uiuc.edu/~a-nathan/pob/BESRWhitePaper.pdf
It doesn’t take a member of MENSA to understand that using a pitch speed of 70 and a bat speed of 66 is using something even 13YOs can easily attain, let alone 19YO HS, or 24YO college players.
Like biggerpappi and others, I too pine for the return of wood bats. Unfortunately, there’s nowhere near enough good wood such as the ML players get, to go around.
As Milo Dad points out, metal bats do skew things, but evidently the ML teams don’t care. Now if they did, you can bet your bippy we’d see a decrease in wood in a heartbeat!
catcher09, makes an interesting point, but I’m afraid its really not very valid. Anyone stupid enough to throw BP to a HS player without an L-screen is a jerk. Getting nailed by a wood bat or a metal on is gonna hurt, and I don’t think anyone would be able to tell the difference when it happened.
observer44, do you really think a ball hit by a CF after a 70MPH pitch and the bat swung at 66, is really coming off faster than it does from wood? I honestly don’t. But, kick either up by a little as 1mph, and you have a much different story.
08dad, it doesn’t matter what generation the bats are, they all have to be tested and meet the requirements. What gets misunderstood is, they can be engineered to perform better once they get outside of the testing parameters.
Rz1, what makes you think the little kids couldn’t handle wood bats and would leave the game? We did it for many many years. Would wood perform the same way metal does? Of course not, but I’m sure there’s some other synthetic right over the horizon that will outperform the newest of modern composites.