Baseball bat performance study

Tom's consulting case (one-week turnaround over a holiday weekend) on a Little League cardiac-arrest case in New Jersey. Tom recovered Feynman freshman-physics momentum/energy conservation; argued bat-and-ball stiffness matching at ~28-mil wall is engineered for maximum performance transfer. Used Naval Surface Weapons Lab high-speed video and compression-testing of balls. Eventually saw 10,000-50,000 pages of discovery.

But I did study bats and injuries for another application. A kid was playing little league down in New Jersey, and it was a minus-12 bat that Little League approved. The pitcher got hit in the chest and his heart stopped. Now he's on a ventilator for the rest of his life. There have been people who've died — this was a little worse, because it's easier to die when you're 14 or 16 years old than to live the rest of your life on a ventilator. Although most of those people on ventilators don't live that long. I was asked several times if I would take an aluminum bat case, because most people didn't want to. I tried to pass them on to Professor Lagace [Lagacé] over in Aero and Astro. He's a big Red Sox fan — he's a consultant to the Red Sox. He did a model of Fenway Park and put it in the MIT wind tunnel, to show that when they put the press boxes up there, they actually did hit more home runs because of the change in the wind pattern coming over the press boxes.