Building the better bat

摘要

Advances in sporting equipment usually revolve around new materials and radical hybrid constructions. Despite the material ad-vances, some manufacturers still take the build-test-break approach to evaluating designs. "This antiquated approach relies on prototypes and subjective user evaluations," says Martin Martinez, president of Engineering Science Analysis Corp., Tempe,Ariz. (esacorp.com). "Worse yet, it provides no way to bypass the competition nor maintain a market lead. And it does little to help engineers understand performance margins that may or may not exist in the design."