Easton Sports makes an appearance on The Futures Channels latest mini-documentary entitled “Testing Bats.” The Futures Channel, which produces videos and DVDs to aid teachers in classrooms, went to Easton Sport's R&D Lab in Van Nuys, California to witness how the testing of sports equipment for durability, performance and handling.
The mini-movie shows a group of Easton engineers and technicians conducting high-tech tests involving cannons, projectiles, robotics and complex equations. They have one important mission in mind: baseball.
One of Easton's main concerns when they are developing new bats is the “sweet spot,” which is the part of the bat that provides the most effective contact with the ball.
“Anybody that's hit a ball on the sweet spot knows what feels like. It's a nice, clean, solid, sweet feeling,” said Al Murphy, the Test Laboratory Manager, in a statement. “The object is to make a bat with the widest sweet spot. A player can't always hit the ball perfectly on the sweet spot every time so what we try to do is try to make the sweet spot as wide as possible.”
The piece nows that to ensure complete accuracy, the engineers require that each test be done under the exact same conditions every time.
“Our standard tests all have very strict procedures that we follow, so that we can test the same part the same way every time,” Murphy explains. “We want to maintain the temperature, we want to maintain the humidity in the room so that we don't add variables into the test that could affect the results.”
The move can be seen at thefutureschannel.com
