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Thursday, October 29, 200922 milliseconds = $850KA big products liability award for the family of a dead American Legion pitcher and against the maker of an aluminum bat company:Attorneys for Hillerich & Bradsby Co. argued any other bat would not have hit the ball differently; in fact, they said, most bats on the market at the time would have struck the ball harder. Patch’s death was a tragic accident, they said. The defense lawyers declined comment after the verdict was read. I've never read the pleadings in this case and I'm not a products lawyer, so I have no idea if this is a crazy verdict or not. I will say, however, that I'm pretty dubious about such claims in general. And I say that even though I'm generally anti-aluminum bat. UPDATE: to clarify: my general position on this is that aluminum bats are either inherently safe with proper use or inherently unsafe and are incapable of proper use that won't cause injury. The presence or absence of a warning, or a milisecond difference between reaction times off of various aluminum bats does not seem like it would render the bat either safe or unsafe to use. As such, these kinds of bats should either be banned, or else we should accept comebackers to the mound as accidents, however unfortunate they might be. (link via BTF) Posted by Craig Calcaterra at 12:47pm Comments
Rob² said...
To follow up, an 84 ms difference between aluminum bats and wooden bats using an NCAA hitter is 4 times the difference between this manufacturer’s bat and the average metal bat, as presented at trial. Which means it’s a much greater relative risk to introduce metal bats at all, than to use the high-tech model instead of the old “pipes” we used to have. Although I will point out that my spreadsheet suggests that the time difference is greater at slower speeds (again, aluminum vs wood), which would imply that there’s actually a greater danger at Little League velocities than at NCAA/MLB velocities. Starting at 60 mph instead of 94 mph, the time difference is 0.132 seconds. Posted 10/29 at 10:38 PM
Alan Nathan said...
Rob: It is more likely the relevant distance is about 53 or 54 ft, since the pitcher is about 5 ft in front of the rubber after release and the ball is hit 1-2 ft in front of the corner of home plate. If I use 53.5 ft, then your 0.462 becomes 0.408 sec, assuming the speed off bat is 94 mph. The 0.378 sec would correspond to a speed off bat of 101.5 mph. Probably 10% loss over 53 ft is too much and is more like 9%. That will lower both results by about 0.5 mph. Posted 10/29 at 10:41 PM
Alan Nathan said...
Rob: I am not sure where you got the 84 ms difference between wood and aluminum. I don’t know where you got any of your numbers. Please explain. Posted 10/29 at 10:46 PM
Alan Nathan said...
Here is an analysis that might interest you. Suppose we agree that 0.400 sec is the minimum amount of time needed for a pitcher to react. Suppose also that we will ban all bats that are capable of hitting a ball that has a shorter flight time to the pitcher than 0.400 sec. What maximum speed off bat does that imply? How far would such a ball travel if hit at a typical home run launch angle (30 deg). Here is the answer (I assume 53.3 ft flight distance from contact to pitcher): Speed off bat: 95 mph I dare say, if you eliminated all such bats, you would drastically change the game of baseball. Posted 10/29 at 10:55 PM
Alan Nathan said...
Just to followup on my earlier posting: For bats approved for use in the NCAA, aluminum outperforms wood by a maximum of about 5 mph, or 5%. That means the flight time difference is about 5% of 400 ms, or 20 ms. That is 4x smaller than the 80 ms that Rob quoted. Posted 10/29 at 11:16 PM
MoZer Bats said...
This is an unfortunate event for everyone involved. I hope that all parties involved can now find peace and closure. custom wood baseball bats have definitely come a long way in making the game safer. Posted 11/04 at 04:42 AM
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Assuming constant deceleration due to wind resistance (and 10% speed reduction over 60.5 ft), it takes a ball traveling off the bat at 94 mph 0.462 seconds to go 60’ 6”. It takes 0.378 seconds to travel the same distance starting at 115 mph.
That’s less than a tenth of a second difference using Phil Nevin’s data.