Posted by: Giant Fan () on Fri Oct 26 17:52:22 2001

>>>The hitter should not think of the arms throwing the bat this cause rotation problems, and is more of a linear technique with less batspeed, but the hitter should think of the hands and wrists as throwing the bat. Jeff Hitman <<<
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> Hi Jeff
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> Professor Robert K. Adair, who wrote “The Physics of Baseball,” stated in his book that it takes about 3-torque horsepower to accelerate a 35-oz bat to 70 mph in 5/30 of a second. He goes on to point out that the arms can only generate about .6-horsepower and that the balance of the energy must come from the larger muscle groups in the legs and torso.
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> I would venture to say that the wrist could only supply about 10% of that .6-horsepower. So extending the hands linearly (or even in a circular path) and relying on the wrist to bring the bat to contact leads to a weak swing. --- Go to the SiteMap at the bottom of the page and read “Wrist Action or Torque.” It may give you different way of thinking about generating bat speed.
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> Jack Mankin


>Recently I responded to a post by saying " From what I think I gather from this dialog, the concern with "throwing the bathead" seems to twofold: (1) Throwing the bat should not result in the hand path deviating from it's natural "circular hand path". And I agree.
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> (2) There seems to be a concern that thinking "throw the bat" that the hands will leap ahead of the hips, disrupting the "kinetic chain" of events. If this were the case, I too would be concerned. However, it's not exactly like you are going to throw the bathead while the lower body remains motionless. Once the stride has been completed and enertia has been overcome, whether you simply think "swing" (what else could you think)or you think "throw bat", hips, hands, everything is moving together more or less as a unit."

Since no one responded I assume that we are in agreement on this issue. But yet it seems like on the one hand you agree with my statement but on the other hand you sometimes seem to think that the hands will sort of take care of themselves if only one uses top hand torque. Maybe you are at long last reevaluating the role of the hands but you can't seem to find a way of making it fit in your model.
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