Major League Baseball

Weighted bats may backfire on sluggers

Published Aug. 2, 2011 1:00 a.m. ET

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Just before game time Tuesday, Detroit Tigers clubhouse manager Jim Schmakel will make sure a long, dirt-stained canvas bag is unloaded in the on-deck circle.

Among other things, it holds a 10-ounce, hard-clay sleeve that slides onto the bat; a 50-ounce weighted bat made of wood and plastic; a half-bat, half-pipe contraption, 96 ounces, with a sliding weight resembling the pendulum weight on a metronome; and an old-fashioned 20-pound sledgehammer.

Almost as an afterthought, he makes sure there are two "doughnut" rings — weights that fit snug on the barrel of the bat, the kind many hitters came to know and trust in Little League.

The doughnuts, at four ounces each, are comparatively puny. These days, in the majors, they typically lay untouched among the hodgepodge of warm-up devices.

But if hitters knew what was good for them and their swing, they wouldn't touch any of it.

In the headstrong, fragile psyches of professional hitters, their on-deck routine makes sense. Swing something heavy — anything heavier than your normal bat — just before your turn at the plate. Then, when you swing for real, your bat will feel lighter.

A lighter bat means quicker hands and a faster, more powerful swing, and an extra shot of confidence.

But scientific research makes clear that the more weight you swing in the on-deck circle, the slower your swing in the batter's box. The slower the swing, the harder it is to catch up to searing fastballs and do what's considered the toughest task in sports: get a base hit.

Coop DeRenne, a physical-education professor at the University of Hawaii, frames his findings in hard numbers: Increase — or even decrease — the weight of your bat between 10 percent and 13 percent, and you decrease bat speed from three to five miles per hour.

"As much as possible," says DeRenne, who is known as the guru of the on-deck ritual among those who study the science of hitting, "the batter should mimic in his warmup what he will do in the game — the same weight, the same motion."

Given that his initial work dates back nearly 20 years and has been repeated by others with similar results, he calls baseball the "dinosaur sport" for its resistance to change.

It's not that baseball is unaware of the research. Over a dozen major-league batting coaches and managers were interviewed on the subject; all were up on the latest science, agreeing that players may be misguidedly governed by routine and superstition. But all say they basically ceded the on-deck circle to the hitters' preferences.

"Every hitter knows that fast and light is better," says Dale Sveum, the Milwaukee Brewers batting coach. "You run sprints to get faster, and you should swing light for a faster swing."

But Sveum says he is reluctant to jar hitters out of their comfort zone. "A good hitter will say, 'Why should I change what I've been successful at?'"

Read more here.

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