Bat Throwing: What You Need to Know Before Throwing Your $300 Bat

Composite bats are made of many layers of fiber, resin, and glue. When a bat comes from the factory, the resin and glue between the fibers are stiff and less flexible. When one is hit by a baseball or softball, the resin and glue begin to break down, this is what players would call “breaking”, literally. As the resin and glue break down, the bat becomes more flexible at that point. The same is achieved through bat rollers, it is compressed through nylon or hard rubber rollers and the resin is broken, leaving the area more flexible. Now when we do that around the circumference of the bat 8 ​​to 12 times, it becomes a lot more flexible. This flexibility equates to an increase in ball speed and greater distance than baseballs or softballs. Studies have been done and some bats have been found, after rolling, to jump up to 5 mph at batted ball speeds. You can calculate around 8 feet per mph of ball speed.

Now wait a minute, isn’t it enough to roll perpendicularly? Enough is a good word because the answer is yes, but if you want the resin to fully break down you would have to make 8-12 more strokes perpendicularly in hopes of getting the bat through the right places. After rolling the bat perpendicular, a sure way to break the rest of the bat would be to roll it through a parallel rolling machine. This breaks up the resin that was lost when rolling straight, for a more consistent and flexible bat. However, the parallel rollers cannot be too long, because there will not be constant and uniform pressure over the length of the rollers. The rollers really should be a maximum of a foot long; this would cover any sweet spot on any bat.

It would seem that breaking the resin would decrease the longevity of a bat. To some extent, this statement is correct, so you could spend about 24 hours of batting practice breaking every point on your bat, hoping not to lose a point or roll the club. In the first case, you would have an extra 24 hours of bat life, as long as you don’t hit the bat in exactly the same spot 10 times, reducing its life. If you had trouble following that, I’ll explain: swinging the bat breaks the entire bat in one hit. Breaking a fire stick by hitting balls without stopping causes an inconsistent break and increases the chances of breaking the bat early. Now the bat still has a strong interwoven mesh of carbon fibers throughout the bat that is very strong, this is what makes it possible for it to stay durable and flexible when the brittle resin breaks down.

So let’s go over this; The rolling of the bat increases the speed of the ball and has a longer life than a broken bat by the same amount through a normal swing.