How can a baseball hit off a tee have a greater exit speed than the swing speed of the bat?
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Same way anything flies faster than the object that hit it: it compresses and springs off the bat. The baseball deforms, allowing it to absorb some of the kinetic energy from the bat and turn it into physical potential energy, over a slightly longer time frame than if it had been more rigid like a bowling ball.
Once it fully deforms, it starts to move at the same speed as the bat, but since the bat’s not imparting any more energy, it starts to decompress. The movement of the bat and the decompression together send it flying a little more quickly than it would as a perfectly solid ball.
*This is the same reason aluminum bats are more powerful– they have much more spring than wood, so the effect becomes twofold.
Because the bat weighs more than the baseball. Momentum is a combination of mass and speed. So when momentum is transferred from one object to a second object that is less massive, it will have a higher speed.
There’s elasticity in the materials in the ball, and elasticity in the bat(if it’s aluminum, say). Both of those can add energy to the ball’s acceleration from stationary on the tee.
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