WebBall.com - Pop in the Swing: Distance is Timing

Pop in the Swing: Distance is Timing

Jack Mankin Jack Mankin has for years billed himself as Mr. Bat Speed. The material included here was first published on WebBall long before he founded his own batspeed.com website. We have not always agreed with every precept he presents or every term he has defined, or every action/consequence he has explained. But we have always appreciated his willingness to go with what his research tells him, and we admire that he has never been content to simply pass on traditional teaching. We should all be as willing to challenge conventional thinking and find our own path. (Click to close.)

Jack Mankin has continued to work through the scientific approach he began in the 1990s. Accoring to Jack at the time, ballplayers and coaches are not necessarily expected to take this as an instructional method, more as a background understanding of what his research says happens in a swing. (No argument from us on that.) This was first published in 1999.

Observations

There's a correlation between the velocity of the bat and how far a hit ball will travel. Yet, two players swinging the same bat on about the same plane with comparable bat speeds may vary greatly in the power they display.

One might hit balls well over 400 ft.

while the other's carry only 300 ft.

This would seem to be contradictory until you take into account when the maximum bat speed occurs during the swing.

The bat speed that really counts is that attained at (or by) contact. Great hitters have the ability to attain their bat speed much earlier in the swing than average hitters. Players with a lot of "pop" in their bat expend all of the body's rotational and torque energies before and at contact. After contact their limbs and torso are relaxed and in a coast mode. The follow-through is from the momentum of the bat pulling the arms up and through.

The Numbers

Average hitters are still expending energy to gain bat speed for 20 to 40 degrees of travel after the bat passes the contact point. Some coaches would contend that gaining speed after contact is beneficial because of "driving through the ball".

The facts do not support this theory. The ball is in contact with a 35 oz. wood bat moving at 70 MPH for about 1/2000 of a sec. During this time the bat moves less than 1 in. - Not much space for "driving through" or "wrapping around" the ball.

NOTE: For our research we measure bat speed when the bat becomes perpendicular to a line from the mound to the plate.

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