If you need to buy new baseball bats for a team you manage or play in, you may not know what you should be looking for when it comes to the best baseball bats for your purpose.
Luckily, there are a few things you can look for when choosing baseball bats. Things that will help you weed out the bats that are not good quality or likely to help your team win, as well as choose the ones that are and could.
Three things to look for — When it comes to choosing a good quality baseball bat, there are three things in particular that are quite important.
These are the weight of the bat, the thickness and how the handle of the bat feels when you grip it.
The weight, of course, means you need a bit that feels heavy enough to swing smoothly but not so heavy that it is weighing you down.
The thickness of any bat used in a game cannot be thicker than 2.61 inches, but you want to make sure that it is as close to that as possible. That is because the thicker the bat the more surface there is to make contact with the ball, and the less chance that the player will miss it when swinging.
As far as the handle of the bat goes, it should offer a firm grip and not be likely to fly out of your hand if you start to lose even a partial grip on it.
Wood or aluminum — While aluminum bats have been popular for quite a long time as players feel they hit the ball faster, the problem with them is they can be quite dangerous.
This is due to the speed a ball travels when hit by one.
This is also why more people are now calling the best baseball bats as those made out of wood. They are easier to take care of, they hit a ball a little slower so tend to be safer for players on the field, and they tend to break less often.
The best material for a bat? — As people move back to wooden bats, there are three types of wood most bats tend to be made from. Nowadays, however, maple or ash are now the woods of choice for most people who know anything about baseball bats.
This is because both maple and ash are woods that are less likely to shatter when a ball is hit with great force. Unlike hickory, which used to be a popular wood for a baseball bat.
Finding the best baseball bats — The easiest way to find the best baseball bats for you or your team is to read reviews of specific bats so that you know how heavy they are, what they are made of, what the grip is like and if the thickness is correct.
You can also read reviews from players that have used specific bats to find out what they did and did not like about them.