Naval Surface Weapon Center baseball bat testing

China Lake high-speed camera contract with Southern California bat manufacturers. Used to teach impedance matching between ball and bat stiffness.

It turns out the Naval Surface Weapon Center in China Lake actually has some fancy high-speed cameras, and the people who make the baseball bats are in Southern California, so they contracted with the Navy. You can now use government labs for things if you pay. They had them take some pictures of bats hitting balls at high speed. And it turns out wood is not a good match. If you're an electrical engineer, it's an impedance mismatch. You have different stiffness. If you have the same stiffness, which you can get as you get thinner and thinner on that back wall, then you can get the ball compressing similar to the amount of deformation of the bat when you hit it.