My oldest kid aged into a new baseball league this year. I wasn’t given any information about what kind of bat he would need so I got him one that I knew was the right length and drop. If you haven’t had the pleasure of having to buy sports gear yet, heads up, 💩 is expensive!
He was told he couldn’t use that bat at his first game because it wasn’t BBCOR- but he had one he could use luckily so no huge deal.
(Google explains BBCOR means but I still don’t get it) how are BBCOR bats different and why would they be mandatory?
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It’s a summary measure of how effective the bat is at transferring energy into the ball. The COR part is “Coefficient of Restitution” and is easier to picture with something like a basketball. If you drop the ball and it returns to nearly its original height, there’s a high COR. I’m not sure how they measure BBCOR – perhaps by shooting a ball at the bat under some standard conditions.
A BBCOR limit is used in baseball bats because bats made of composite materials are able to give much more energy to the ball via a “trampoline effect.” A thinner, more flexible material on the outside of the bat flexes and snaps back, giving an extra launch to the ball. Composite bats need to demonstrate that they are not taking unfair (I guess because otherwise competitive parity would demand everyone has to buy *even more expensive* bats?) advantage of this effect and have a BBCOR under a certain limit.
It’s easier to set that limit in terms of BBCOR rather than other standards (e.g. what the bat is made of) because it’s the thing that organizers directly care about. That cuts down on loopholes the people writing the regulations didn’t consider.
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