It depends on who you talk to. Composite bats are made of many layers of carbon fiber, resin, and glue. When a bat comes from the plant the resin and glue inbetween the fibers are rigid and less pliable. When a bat is hit by a baseball or softball the resin and glue begin to break, this is what players would call “breaking in”, literally. As the resin and glue loosens up the bat becomes more pliable in that location . The same thing is accomplished by bat rolling, a bat is compressed through nylon or hard rubbers rollers and the glue breaks up leaving the area more pliable. Now when you do that all around the circumference of the bat 8-12 times the bat becomes a lot more pliable. This pliability translates into an increase in batted ball speed and more distance of struck baseballs or softballs. Reasearch has been performed and found that some bats after being rolled rose up as much as 5mph in hit ball speeds. One can figure exactly 8 feet per mph of batted ball speed.
Now, wait a minute isn’t perpendicular bat rolling enough? Sufficient is a good adjective because the answer is yes, but if one wants the adhesive broken up totally one would have to take about 8-12 more passes through perpendicularly chancing you roll the bat through the correct region. After the bat is rolled perpendicularly, a secured way to break in the rest of the bat would be to roll it through a parallel rolling machine. This breaks up the resin that the perpendicular bat rolling missed, for a better even and flexible bat. The parallel rollers can not be long, although, because there will not be a consistent and unvarying force over the length of the rollers. bat rollers really need to be a maximum limit of 6 inches in length; this would cover all of the sweet spot on all bats.
It should appear like crushing up the glue would cut the longevity of a bat. To an extent this statement is correct so one could expend about 24 hours of batting practice breaking in every all spots on the bat, trusting you did not miss a spot or get the bat rolled. In the first case you could get 24 hours more bat life as long as you did not stike the bat in the exact area 10 times consequently reducing its life. If you had problems understanding that I will make it clear: bat rolling breaks in the length of bat with one swoop. Breaking in a bat in by taking batting practice causes an inconsistent break in and multiples the chances of cracking the bat sooner. Now the bat still has a strong linked mesh of carbon fibers throughout all of the bat which is very strong, this is what makes it possible to stay strong and contract when the adhesive is broken up.
Let’s look this over; the bat rolling method increases batted ball speed and has a more extended life than a bat broken in the same amount through usual hitting. Sounds reliable to me but some governing bodies of softball have ruled this an illegal conversion. Bat rolling, as a stand alone modification, can not be detected: so what the associations do not know cannot hurt them.
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