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

Composite bats are made from many layers of fiber, resin, and glue. When a bat comes from the factory, the resin and the glue between the fibers are stiff and less flexible. When a 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 rollers or hard rubbers and the resin breaks leaving the most flexible area. Now when we do that around the circumference of the bat 8 ​​to 12 times, it becomes much more flexible. This flexibility equates to an increase in ball speed and greater distance than baseballs or softballs. Studies have been done and it has been found that some bats, after being rolled, jump up to 5 mph at batted ball speeds. You can figure about 8 feet per mph of ball speed.

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

It would seem that breaking down the resin would decrease a bat’s longevity. To an 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 bat. In the first case, you would have an additional 24 hours of bat life, as long as you don’t hit the bat in exactly the same place 10 times, which reduces its life. If you had trouble following that, I’ll explain: The swing of the bat breaks the entire bat in one hit. Breaking a fire stick by hitting balls nonstop causes inconsistent breaking and increases the chances of breaking the bat sooner. 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 remain 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 bat broken by the same amount through a normal hit.