Testing Baseball Bats

Heavy Bat v.s. Light Bat

When playing baseball does a heavier bat hit farther than a lighter bat? I believe that the heavier bat has more power behind it. On, the other hand the lighter bat will help the speed of your swing. I chose to do this assignment because my favorite sport is baseball and I had always wondered this. When I had switched from using lighter bats in Little League to having to use heavier bats in school leagues I was scared but people said that heavier bats had more power behind them so I put this theory to the test.

How I accomplished this was by ordering a batting tee online then using one of my bats from Little League that was a -12(19 ounces) and my school league bat which was a -3 ( 29 ounces). I went to the field then put the tee on home plate. Next I put the ball on the tee and starting hitting the balls with my -12 (19 ounces) bat. I did 100 hits on that bat in pairs of 10 and measured each ball when I hit 10 of them. I did the same for the -3 (29 ounces) bat.

After all the testing, the -3 (29 ounces) bat hit farther than the -12 (19 ounces) bat and the -3 (29 ounces) bat was declared the victor. My data was 76.9 feet for the -12 (19 ounces) bat and 80.8 feet for the -3 (29 ounces) bat. This meant that the -3 (29 ounces) bat was a better hitting bat than the -12 (19 ounces) bat. This was a surprise to me because I thought the -3 (29 ounces) at would have won by more than around 4-5 feet.

My hypothesis was right the -3 (29 ounces) bat which hit 80.8 feet does have more power behind it and improved my distance on how for the ball went compared to my -12 (19 ounces) bat which hit 76.9. I learned that even though it made my swing slow down it made the ball go far. There could have been error because sometimes I tipped the tee, but I did it on a baseball field so it would be more accurate. I could improve my experiment by doing it in different ways than just hitting it off the tee like have someone pitching it to me. All in all this was a fun experiment.