What iis the Difference Between Bat Speed & Exit Velocity?

What is the Difference Between Bat Speed & Exit Velocity?s t

The Difference Between Bat Speed & Exit Velocity

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This was from the Sports Science episode where Jennie Finch was pitted against a minor league baseball player. They were using the plexiglass as a cover for the sensor measuring force at impact. The baseball was traveling at around 90 MPH and di nothing to the plexiglass. Jennie's 68 MPH softball pitch shattered the plexiglass. This means there is a big difference between the force of a softball vs a baseball thrown harder. This a major factor in hitting a softball. The softball bats are lighter than baseball bats and the ball is heavier in softball. This makes it more difficult for players to have a high game Exit Velocity.

Bat Speed is easily confused with Exit Speed or Exit Velocity. There is a correlation between the two but there are some differences. Bat Speed stays fairly consistent with most hitters, unless the hitter is fooled and alters their swing to try and make up for the timing mistake. When a hitter is early, you may see their butt go out as they reach out in front of home plate to wave at a change up, which will lower the Bat Speed. When they're late, they will bring the hands in, lean back and try to create space between themselves and the ball, also lowering Bat Speed. When they are on time, their Bat Speed is pretty consistent.

Exit Velocity is the speed of the ball off the bat. Again, there is a correlation with Bat Speed and Exit Velocity but there are a lot of determining factors. In Ev Hitting, we refer to perfect contact as 100/100/100. This means the batter was 100% on time at contact, 100% of their most powerful swing and 100% perfect contact. Perfect contact is when the sweet spot of the bat hits exactly the center of the ball. All 3 of these things happening together almost never happens. 100/100/100 is about that perfect moment when all 3 elements come together. Think of this as the boiling point or freezing point. We know that at 32 degrees water freezes, it is very cold at 36 degrees, but only freezes at 32 degrees. The 100/100/100 is about that perfect moment that we can measure from, one element at a time.

With that understanding, when a hitter is close to 100/100/100, Bat Speed is typically very high and Exit Velocity is a certain percentage higher than Bat Speed. A few decades ago, there was a device that would measure Bat Speed and Exit Velocity together. I did a massive amount of studies surrounding this subject. The device would tend to measure the end of the bat vs the sweet spot that the knob devices are measuring today, so our bat speeds were much higher then. At that time, if the Bat Speed was 90 MPH, the Exit Velocity, when contact was near 100%, would be about 6 MPH faster. 90 MPH Bat Speed would produce 96 MPH Exit Velocity, if all was close to 100/100/100. This would be called a Smash Factor in golf, but baseball has just now begun considering this.

There were many players that would have higher Bat Speed than Exit Velocity when they first came to see me. I defined swing efficiency as getting the Bat Speed to maximum and when the Exit Velocity was 6 MPH higher, the swing was producing close to 100%. This lead to a ton of experimental swing tests that I have never seen anyone else do as of yet. One goal all hitters should shoot for is to have the same Bat Speed every swing, but the Exit Velocity will depend on how close to 100% all 3 elements are.

In softball hitting, this smash factor is even more important because the softball is heavier than a baseball and the softball bat is lighter than a baseball bat. This makes it more difficult to get the Exit Velocity higher than the Bat Speed. This is a very misunderstood part of Game Exit Velocity and a major element in Ev Hitting. Softball hitters must overcome the force at impact. Most players have no idea about this factor and so they don't train for it. We made this a main station in the Ev Hitting Programs.

Players should use some type of heavy ball to help train to lock out at impact to lose less energy.

The basketball, making sure to use the age appropriate type ball, is great for simulating the force of a softball thrown at game speeds. This one is a WNBA sized basketball fully inflated. To increase the Game Exit Velocity, players have to learn to lock out correctly to lower the amount of loss of energy at impact. Training with a basketball using Exit Velocity will tell you how strong you are at impact. You should be at about 75% of your max Tee Exit Velocity with an appropriately sized basketball (there are 4 sizes of basketballs for each age group). Most hitters test out lower because they have never trained with a heavy ball.

During that early testing, we often saw Bat Speed increase when players were hitting the basketballs. When they realized the increase with basketballs, their Bat Speed would go up with tee swings as well.