Posted by: Chris O'Leary (chris@chrisoleary.com) on Mon Jun 20 12:34:58 2005

I coach two teams of 10 year old baseball playing boys.

One problem I constantly have with them is that they want to use the longest bat possible. While I'm not sure, I believe that my guys consistently do better when hitting with shorter bats (regardless of the weight, at least to a degree). In my case, that means that I would generally prefer that they use a 28 inch/19 ounce bat (the maximum drop in this league is -9) and this seems to work.

What's interesting is that half of my guys play for a second team in a league with no drop restrictions. As a result, I see a lot of guys show up with 30 inch/17 ounce bats. I don't have any hard evidence to prove it, but I believe that my guys still do better when hitting with a 28/19 bat than they do with a 30/17 bat. They seem to get the 28/19 around better than they do the 30/17, even though it weighs slightly more.

The thing that brings this to mind is that this weekend we were in a hole and then rallied to come within one run with the bases loaded. Up to that point, everyone had been using the 28/19 and got on base via either hits or walks. My last batter then walked up to the plate with a 30/17 that he wouldn't give up and then proceeded to strike out swinging.

I was wondering if you had any thoughts about this. When it comes to bat speed and getting the bat around, is length or weight more important? In my anecdotal experience, I would say that length seems to matter more than weight, but I was wondering if you had any hard evidence either way.