Posted by: () on Mon May 12 11:52:57 2003

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> I think that since the ball spends only a fraction of a second in contact with the bat some would say the speed at this point is all that matters in how far it travels. If you take two bats 25 oz vs 30 oz and if both bats are aluminium and have a BFP of 1.20 and contact the ball at 90 mph I bet the 30 oz bat goes farther. Somewhere in this equation is overcoming the force of the pitched ball.

I think this last point is worth pursuing. At these ages, a smaller kid might be using a very light bat (I've picked up kids bats that seem to weigh no more than the ball). Most of the posts on this site that deal with bat weight deemphasize it, but that's usually talking about minor weight differences in adult size bats. Before there's any meaningful comparisons of size and strength and batspeed, we have know that the bats are of a similar weight and length. D