A small-sample acoustic survey of ten professional-grade wood bats, measured at the same facility on the same evening with a fixed measurement rig. Findings are comparative within this cohort and should be read as preliminary — not a manufacturing verdict.
When a baseball strikes a bat, kinetic energy from the pitch and the swing redistributes across many channels in a few milliseconds. Most leaves with the ball. Some carries the bat through to follow-through. The rest dissipates as heat, sound, and structural vibration in the bat itself.
Vibrational energy is small in absolute terms — only a few joules per impact. But it is the channel that travels through the bat into the hands, and a hitter takes thousands of swings in a season. This study is about that channel.
A good wood bat rings in three or four frequencies at once. The lowest of those tones is the trouble: ISO 5349 — the standard for occupational hand-arm vibration — weights low frequencies as most damaging to hands and forearms.
The cohort below shows ten bats ranked by how their energy distributes across these tones.
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Each bat graded on a curve relative to the other nine. Four metrics: Wh (ISO 5349 hand-arm), Wp (ISO 8041 perceived), T² (bone-resonance, 200–700 Hz), sub-200 share (tissue-dosage proxy). Averaged into the overall grade.