I am in the same boat as everyone else trying to find a new bat for my son. It is hard to find something that feels right when all you can do is pickup and hold a bat at a store, and that is if the local stores carry the bat your interested in. I know it is the indian and not the arrow but I am also trying to find a bat my son likes without going thru the trial and error of buying multiple bats.
One thing I see everyone posting is that the BBCOR bats will perform just like wood. I do agree there is a significant change in the performance from the BESR bats but I think people are jumping to conclusions that these bats will be similar to wood always and that all bats will be the same. The BBCOR standard is new and the bat companies are still adjusting and learning how to adapt to the new rules. The bats that will be available in the next few years will probably be far superior to the bats available today and to wood. Let me explain my reasoning.
First, the Coefficient of Restitution rule basically regulates how fast a ball can rebound off of a bat (it actually measures the loss of energy from a collision of the bat and the ball but for our purposes, the rebound is sufficient). While all bats will be limited by this test, the bat companies can work to make a much larger sweet spot across as much of the bat as possible. They can use different materials and engineer the wall thickness and weight distribution of the bats to still limit the bats to conform to the BBCOR limit but they can extend the sweet spot and they will work to do this. If you can hit the ball 3" off center from the sweet spot without much loss of rebound from a normal on center hit (power), why wouldn't you want a bat like that... We know that you can't do that with a wood bat. Also they can adjust the MOI (swing weight, heft, end loading/balanced, etc...) of the bat to allow users to find a bat that fits their strength and their swing.
To fully understand this you only need to look at golf clubs. The USGA instituted a COR rule for golf clubs several years ago. Initially the companies had to adapt and there were a lot of complaints. The sweet spot was too small, etc... But with all the engineering that has been done, the driver that I user today is a dramatic improvement over what was first available after the rule was imposed. Yes, the limit is still what is limited by the COR rule so I am not gaining the extra few yards if I had a non-conforming club but I can still get very good distance and so much more forgiveness than I ever had before. If I hit a conforming COR driver from 2001 and one from today, with the same swing speed and both in the center of the swing spot, they will both go the same distance. But if I hit both clubs 1/2" off center, I can guarantee that the newer driver will far exceed the distance of the 2001 driver because of the large sweet spot created by all the engineering for the clubheads done over the past 10 years.
I suspect that the bat companies will be doing the same thing. Last year it looks like many companies rushed to get BBCOR bats made so they simply put in rings inside the bats to limit the rebound. They didn't have the time to properly engineer their bats. It created a very small sweet spot and people were complaining loudly (and they sounded horrible). This year we are hearing about new bats that are engineered with wall thicknesses to still meet the BBCOR rules but also have a larger sweet spot. I suspect every company will be working to increase the sweet spot and it will be a dramatic improvement over what is available today.
Note that I would prefer we go back to using wood but...this BBCOR rule is not going to make these bats perform like wood so I'm already resigned to the fact that I will be buying BBCOR bats in the future as well... I suspect in a couple of years we will all be complaining about how these BBCOR bats don't perform like wood and it makes kids with poor swings into decent hitters. That's what the bat companies will be trying to do and the BBCOR rules do nothing to really prevent that. It just happens that the current new BBCOR bats aren't quite there yet but I have no doubt that they will be.
I have no affiliation with bat companies. I happen to have gone thru this same phenomenon with building golf clubs and the parallels are very similar so I thought I would share my thoughts...
TC
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