from Amazon
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Corked bats and humans
I think we talked about this, and we probably linked to Alan’s research. Anyway, here it is again:
http://webusers.npl.illinois.edu/~a-nathan/pob/corked-bat-remarks.pdf
As well as a followup:
http://paws.kettering.edu/~drussell/bats-new/Papers/CheatingPaper.pdf
Bill James noted:
To jump from the conclusion that there’s no trampoline effect to the conclusion that there is no overall effect....I wouldn’t believe it.
Now, what could account for an effect to actually exist, if physics says there shouldn’t be a change? Isn’t it possible that there’s a change in the swing that is too small for us to notice, but has an overall effect? That is, Alan is saying that the speed of swing and weight of bat, and consistency of cork has an overall no effect, all other things equal. But, what if the plane of the swing changes slightly because of the corking? What if accuracy is improved?
Shouldn’t the test therefore be to observe the swings of hitters with and without cork to see if their swing is actually different? What if it’s even a placebo affect that a batter thinks he can wait .01 seconds longer before swinging, and swings harder, while maintaining accuracy?
What if the corking of a bat is simply a change in human response?
***
I’m reminded of the new basketball that was introduced, and immediately panned by the players. The same thing with the new hockey sweaters. Physics can tell us in a controlled environment, all other things equal, what happens. But things change with humans. They sweat, and if the experiment didn’t include a human sweating, then they couldn’t predict the new basketball reaction to sweat. A hockey player will skate in various patterns, and if the players say the sweater is too tight, then that means the experiment didn’t have a good enough human parameter set.
Could this happen with corked bats?
I wasn’t aware that Bill James had commented on this issue. Can you provide a link to his comments. Meanwhile, here is a direct quote from my paper:
This is the comment Tango has attributed to Bill James:
So, if James is specifically commenting on our work, I would say that I agree with him, as the quote from my own paper shows. Just to be clear, we claim that a ball is generally not hit harder (i.e., with higher batted ball speed) with a corked bat (and that result follows not only from the absence of a trampoline effect but also from an analysis of the tradeoff between bat speed and collision efficiency). We make no other claim. In particular, I would certainly expect that a batter using a corked bat would have better bat control (a “quicker” bat) and therefore make good contact more often.