The Sweet Spot: A Wave Model of Baseball Bats

摘要

We determine the sweet spot on a baseball bat. We capture the essential physics of the ball-bat impact by taking the ball to be a lossy spring and the bat to be an Euler-Bernoulli beam. To impart some intuition about the model, we begin by presenting a rigid-body model. Next, we use our full model to reconcile various correct and incorrect claims about the sweet spot found in the literature. Finally, we discuss the sweet spot and the performances of corked and aluminum bats, with a particular emphasis on hoop modes.