The Atlanta Braves want Pache to try a heavier bat… will it matter?
Yesterday, we quoted from a Dave O’Brien interview in which he was discussing Adam Duvall with Atlanta Braves hitting coach Kevin Seitzer. Link to the subscription-only article.
In that interview was another nugget worth exploring a bit further: an answer from Seitzer about Cristian Pache and the “pop” in his bat (emphasis added):
"Yeah, he’s got a lot of pop. He swings a really light bat. That’s something that I’m gonna address a little bit this offseason and kind of make a suggestion that he needs to go up an ounce. Because, I mean, he is so strong and quick. And he’s got leverage. But it’s like, if you hit a ball with a Wiffle bat, it’s not gonna go very far, compared to what it could."
He’s got a point: Pache is a strapping young athlete: 22 years old, 6’2″/215 pounds. Yet while he did homer in this year’s postseason, that was only his 22nd homer in his entire professional career.
So this raised a question: all other things being equal, what is the impact (literally) on a baseball when you increase a bat’s weight?
At this point, I’ll insert the required advisory statement: if you’re one who usually exclaims “Hey — nobody said there would be math!”, then perhaps you should turn aside now and go back to your Candy Crush Saga game. Okay, good: the Phillie fans have left.
May the Forces be with you
This entire topic falls into the basket marked ‘Newton’s Law of Motion’. In layman’s terms, the relevant ones are these:
- #2: Force = mass x acceleration
- #3: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction
- There’s also another equation involved here: momentum = mass x velocity
In short, the simple version of the problem is this:
- A 5-1/8 oz. baseball is hurtling toward the catcher at roughly 90 mph.
- A bat (usually 30-35 ounces these days) is rotating through a curve whose center is defined somewhere in the vicinity of the hands and torso of a batter. The barrel is accelerating to roughly 80 mph.
- The bat has a weight to it, and that affects the force it exerts when coming through the hitting zone.
Now let’s get a little dirty…