Well, this should be fun this season. From the IHSA (Illinois) website:

JM

In Ohio we are lucky to have Kyle McNeely (chair of NF Baseball Rles Committee) to go to for answers. I talked with him last week at our state rules interpreters meeting.

Mattingly bat: Legal

Reebok Vector O: Illegal. Only because Reebok failed to present the bat to BESR certification committee. Reebok was notified on Thursday January 22 by NF rules committee the bat was illegal.

DeMarini Vendetta: Illegal. The handle is not smooth, nor cylindical. It has raised rails.

Additionally, those of you who have said the "smooth, cylider" part of bat definition only applies to the barrel are dead wrong.

The only reason for all of this horse$&it is to make sure that us officials don't ever run out of anything to argue about among ourselves.

Is the NFHS going to issue this to the states? I talked with my State Director yesterday and he said we were going to wait on something from NFHS. He is not going to declare them legal or illegal until/unless NFHS does.

I just saw a memo written on NFHS letterhead dated today (February 5) that was sent to Member State Association Executive Directors. It states that both the DeMarini Vendetta and the Reebok Vector "...have been found rule-compliant by the NFHS for use in high school baseball..."

$ound$ like they've been approved for use by the NFH$

Came from our high school Interscholastic Athletic Association State Director by way of my association president. Sure looked official to me.

Okay...the chair of the FED rules committee rules the bats illegal and a piece of FED letterhead states that the bats are legal.

I hope y'all don't mind some of us waiting until FED speaks with one voice,

You mi$$ed one. I gue$$ the NFH$ didn't get a$ much a$ they wanted.

What I saw came from Elliot Hopkins. I believe he is the NFHS director of educational services and liaison to the Baseball Rules Committee.

Legal?
 

I also posted this on NFHS forum: Can you please show some documentation that this is correct? I cannot find anything on the FED website or anywhere else that this is correct.

I can't wait to let a kid use one.

Response
 

The New York State Baseball Umpires Assn has posted a notice on their web site saying the message is from FED.

Kevin, the bat is so expensive, some schools and parents may buy it and then not let anyone use it at that price.

Well, it's a little slow here on a Friday night, so.....

A couple of pages back, dash_riprock suggested that adding holes to the Reebok bat was silly. MTD. Sr. took him to task, asserting that dash hadn't learned fluid mechanics. dash invited MTD to provide a calculation of drag, but instead got a (wrong) explanation of ball-bat collisions.

Dash was right-- there is little benefit to adding holes to the bat handle. The drag on a cylinder is proportional to the area times the velocity squared. Since the handle moves roughly at 1/3 the speed of the barrel, and the area is perhaps 1/10 that of the barrel, in rough terms the air resistance of the handle is about 1% that of the barrel. Reducing that 1% to perhaps 0.8% is a very small effect.

And the ball-bat collision stuff? MTD starts with the assertion that the collision is elastic. But it isn't. A baseball has a coefficient of restitution of around 0.45 at typical collision velocities, and is limited by rule to 0.565 at 60 mph (less than bunting speed). All the subsequent discussion of conservation of energy and momentum, and sums of velocities is inappropriate for inelastic ball-bat collisions.

Finally, this assertion: "The mass of the bat is much greater that the mass of the ball and it only takes a small increase in a bat's velocity to greatly effect the amount of momentum transfered from the bat to the ball." is way wrong.

If the collision were elastic, a 1 mph increase in bat speed would give a 2 mph increase in ball exit speed. But since the COR is about 1/2, the actual effect is 1 mph in bat speed gives about 1 mph in ball exit speed.

Oddly, I think I actually understood (sorta' ) what Dave Reed said here, and found his argument compelling.

Nicely done.

JM