Baseball bats

          In this post I will be discussing baseball bats. I played baseball almost my whole life, and one thing that immediately stood out to me in this section was how it almost perfectly applies to the production and use of baseball bats.  Over the years undoubtedly production methods have made baseball bats better. They’re more comfortable, have larger “sweet spots," and higher exit velocities than previous generations. However year to year all companies continually produce newer versions of the same bat from the previous year with little to no difference among performance. They may have different color schemes, different names, possibly even a different weight distribution throughout the bat but otherwise they are all relatively the same thing. To me this is especially true since baseball leagues now have to stick to a BBCOR standard for all bats. This is meant to level the playing field between hitters and pitchers and make metal or composite bats more comparable to wooden ones. This also had an effect on decreasing exit velocity as well as making sure if bats did break they would not splinter and hurt any players. However although these bats are fairly similar hitters always have a certain type of bat they feel more comfortable with or “hit better” with. If a hitter uses an Easton Stealth bat for a year and has the best year of his career hitting, then he will undoubtedly keep using that bat, regardless of whether the bat made any difference or not. Eventually however baseball bats do wear out, and after they do you can be sure there will be a newer model of the same bat that somehow improved upon the last one in some way that companies are able to market it as better. We can spend all the time we want looking through bats, other peoples opinions on them, whether to use a two piece or one piece bat. In the end however the amount of work put in by the player will have a much greater effect on his performance than the bat ever will.