Baseball batting device

tportner · Post by **tportner** » Wed Dec 15, 2004 8:17 pm

Any ideas as to how to construct a simple baseball batting device (spring loaded, perhaps?) that swings a bat that will consistantly hit a stationary ball?

deleted-71268 · Post by **deleted-71268** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 12:50 am

This doesn't seem to be an easy problem to solve if you want the ball to go a reasonable distance, simulating a real human batter. Any real engineering folks want to jump in here and help out with ideas?

An alternative approach could be to use a human hitter to bat many times off of a tee with each different kind of bat, and then use statistics math to sort out the meaningful difference. This means that the most difficult part would probably be learning and understanding how to do the statistics math, but it might be easier than building the spring-loaded batting device.

deleted-2131 · Post by **deleted-2131** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:39 am

I agree with SJStanko. You will most likely be better off using actual humans and some stats rather than coonstructing a batter, unless of course that is the goal of your project. The problem is that the geometry and physics must be so precise to ensure control that I am not even sure that you you get less variation using a batting device than a human.

Are you at all familiar with statistical analysis? Its pretty easy to do once you get the hang of it. I would love to tell you more about it if you are interested.

tportner · Post by **tportner** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 8:33 am

Thanks for the advice. Using an actual batter would be much easier and more fun. My mom had had several graduate level statistics courses but she says she may be a bit rusty. She would appreciate the guidance, however.

billchapman · Post by **billchapman** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:09 pm

Fun discussion!

What are the goals of your experiment? If you can clearly state these, that should help you design the experiment.

For example, suppose you sought to quantify certain aspects of bat performance. Could you find simple experimental solutions that will give you understandable data? Consider dropping baseballs squarely onto stationary bats (maybe through a tube to improve reproducibility). What could be observed and inferred from such an experiment? Could you think of ways to measure the resulting shock and vibration at the handle end of the bat? Where is the fulcrum of each bat? Depending on the goals of your study, you might limit the bats to be of identical length and/or weight... or you might prefer to study the effect of these parameters as variables.

You might want to combine such an approach with human testing. This would give you the opportunity to look for statistical correlations between the quantified bat parameters and the performance in the hands of human batters.

-bill

deleted-2131 · Post by **deleted-2131** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 7:52 pm

tportner,

There are many different kinds of analysis that can be done, each dependant on the type of experiment being conducted, and the type of information you would like to know. In order to determine what type of analysis you should use, we will need to know more about your project. Can you give us any more information?

Good Luck!