Baseball - Hitting

When a batter stands at home plate, ready to strike the ball with a bat, it is called hitting. There are many instances of physics in this process. One of these instances is in the action of swinging the bat. The average baseball player will take 150 milliseconds to start and finish his swing. At its peak, a player can swing the bat with a speed of 70 mph, faster than most speed limits on a freeway. To achieve this, a player puts most of his weight (let's say 180 lbs, the size of an average American) on his back foot. When he releases the energy now contained in his back foot, he releases a force of over 250 pounds in this 150 milliseconds. As he rotates his hips and brings his hands (and the bat) through, he uses the 250 pound force and the new 50 pound force created by his hands and the bat to strike the ball, a transfer of energy that takes less than a tenth of a second. However, the ball does not take all of the energy used by the batter. At most, it will take 1/2 the kinetic energy of the forces centered on the bat, and that is only if it is hit squarely. The ball will usually only take about 1/5 of the kinetic energy of the bat.