THE BOOK cover
The Unwritten Book is Finally Written!
An in-depth analysis of: The sacrifice bunt, batter/pitcher matchups, the intentional base on balls, optimizing a batting lineup, hot and cold streaks, clutch performance, platooning strategies, and much more.
Read Excerpts & Customer Reviews

Buy The Book from Amazon


SABR101 required reading if you enter this site. Check out the Sabermetric Wiki. And interesting baseball books.
MOST RECENT ARTICLES
MAIL : You ask | We say

Advanced


THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

Filter posts by...

 

Friday, January 23, 2009

Wood v Metal

By Tangotiger, 10:52 AM

So very cool:

The most obvious comparison method is average distance with wood vs. average distance with metal. The 30 wood bat homers averaged 373.1 feet, while the 230 metal bat homers that were measured averaged 408.1 feet (a few catwalk homers have not yet been analyzed). That’s a difference of 35 feet, or about 9.4 percent. A similar comparison of speed off the bat yields 100.6 mph for wood, and 108.9 mph for metal bats, a difference of 8.3 mph, or 8.3 percent.

The small sample size for wood bat homers means that there remains a lot of uncertainty in the “translation factor” from wood to metal bats, but knocking roughly 10 percent off the distance of a home run hit by a high school or college slugger can provide a good rough estimate of how far it might have gone with a wooden bat. For line drives that don’t clear the fence, knocking off about 8 percent of the speed off bat will give a reasonable wooden bat estimate.

(12) Comments • 2009/01/28 • SabermetricsMinors_CollegeTechnology
Page 1 of 1 pages

Latest...

COMMENTS

May 26 13:18
What makes for a successful GM?

May 26 12:47
Do pitcher’s reach back for velocity when needed?

May 26 07:27
“Why Kickstarter works”

May 26 03:03
Pete Palmer’s new book: Basic Ball

May 26 01:11
Largest demonstration in Canadian history?

May 25 19:41
What sabermetrics is NOT

May 25 16:59
Howard Stern

May 25 12:51
Chad Curtis

May 25 11:26
Lack of hustle during a game

May 25 10:58
Rooting for laundry

THREADS

January 23, 2009
Wood v Metal