How to measure bat speed without a radar gun

Re: Radar gun?

Posted by: Ronnie () on Fri Oct 15 14:07:01 2010

> Hitting instructor pulled out a radar gun at last nights hitting lesson and had me help take measurements of my daughters swings/hits. She, according to him, was putting up the best numbers of the day, mid to low 70's. I heard them talking about numbers with two other girls while my daughter was pitching. They were getting around 60-65. My question is while they are all rotational hitters, how can I be sure what the radar gun is measuring? The pitches he threw where around 55mph so i know it was not the pitch, but was it the speed of bat or ball going away from the plate after being hit?

Hi Dave,
The radar gun is recording the highest speed which should be the ball exit speed. If you want to measure batspeed do it off a tee. MLB Scouts want to know ball exit velocity and I think the reason is batspeed can be early in the swing or late developing in the swing. Kids love trying to out do each other so it can be fun. The only measurement you really want to know is exit velocity which will give an indication of the speed of the bat at contact which is hard to measure. There is probably an equation of pitch speed + batspeed x ? will = ?. In the end you want to know ball exit speed because one can have a 90 mph swing and have poor exit speed because they could not generate the batspeed at contact - the MLB scouts obviously know this.
Best Wishes!
Ronnie

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Originally posted by Maxx View Post

@Scorekeeper - yes, that is one instance. I also would like to use it to determine amongst my team what physical characteristics seem to impact exit speed, i.e. a weight room correlation or a mecanics correlation, especially if kids come from the same travel program. We could also use it at camps and as an evaluation tool for recruits. Do a search for Frank Spaniol to see some of his research. Here is a link to one of his studies: http://falcon.tamucc.edu/~fspaniol/N...%20Spaniol.pdf

Kool. You know me though, I’m a sucker for any kind of numbers!

What I’d be interested in, would be seeing how that stuff matched up with performance. FI, if the guy who coaches the team I score for would get that stuff on every player, I’d run relations between the actual game numbers and what had been measured.

I have a niggling little thing in the back of my head that says if using those kinds of measurements were “commonplace”, there would be a lot of folks totally throwing out performance stats in favor of what those measurements show. I can think of one guy on this board who would bet the 1st one to toss any performance numbers in favor of physical ones.

Eventually we’d see pitchers being chosen by their leg strength and hitters by their bat speed, and that seems to me the very same thing as choosing a pitcher because he was big. S’ok for physically mature players, but I get worried when this kind of stuff gets applied to those who aren’t physically mature.

Let me know when you start getting numbers! Unless you have something already set up to do it, I’ll see if I can whip ya out something you could store the data you collect in, then present it. It would be a great project for me.

The pitcher who’s afraid to throw strikes, will soon be standing in the shower with the hitter who's afraid to swing.

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