SWEETNESS:

One hundred years ago, Babe Ruth was redefining how baseball was played, and understood. In 1920, Prof. A.L. Hodges, "the Well-Known Physicist," wrote Ruth had "a 44 Horse-Power Swing Which Shoots the Ball Skyward at Six Miles a Minute," a fascinating attempt at a proto-Statcast. The next year, a pair of Columbia scientists strapped the Great Bambino into all sorts of tubes and machines in an attempt to break down the ways in which his body moved and reacted, hoping to find how he managed all those swats the sultan was known for. (...)

4) How do you define bat speed?

You'd think this would be the easy part, right? It is not.

Remember when we said Chisholm's June 10 home run had a swing speed of 94.1 mph ("sort of")? That's because different parts of the bat move at different speeds; the end of the bat has a lot longer to go than the handle does, in the same amount of time. You could say the head of his bat was traveling at 113 mph, which it was. You could say the point of the bat that made impact was going 98.6 mph.

Or you could say that the "sweetspot," the part where players are almost always actually trying to make contact, was going 94.1 mph. That or something near it is generally the industry standard -- Blast Motion, one of the leading wearable solutions, uses 6 inches exactly, for example -- and it's a point that's easily understood for casual fans, so that's what we'll use here: 6 inches from the head.

It's almost like asking whether you should measure the velocity of a pitch out of the hand (as is done now) or at a set point (as has been done in the past) or at the time it gets to the plate. All are valid, and there are many choices, but for simplicity's sake, you might just have to pick one. The sweetspot, then, it is.

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