Hitting baseballs vs softballs

[CoreSoftball20]

Right now my man Core is cringing because he knew my post was coming, lol!

When we did a Mizuno demo day here....we got to the turf and on the far side some
hitting coach has like 4 girls there and he was soft tossing baseballs for them to hit...
the sound the CFs were making....yuk. I was like, yeah, he isnt buying the bats so he doesnt care.
Then all his girls jumped in to demo bats and I talked to him for like 2 minutes
and couldnt do it anymore

 

[Westwind]

There really isn’t a great reason to use baseballs…. Especially if it worries the bat owner.

We had ideas about why we did it but I don’t know how valid they were.

 

[289nate]

Not but a month ago my friend came over to hit with his daughter and son in our backyard batting cage. Her dad loves to do front toss with baseballs before the kids head off the machines.

This time his daughter wanted to try to hit off the baseball pitching machine just like her older brother was doing. It’s a Homeplate triple play ultra by sports tutor. They throw a heavy ball. Within a couple swings 2020 DeMarini prism was cracked badly! She decided to keep hitting with it and that eventually broke it in half on the barrel. Never seen anything like it.

The girl is 12 slender a very good hitter but not yet filled out enough to be a power/ homerun hitter. I believe we only had the machine set to 50 mph as well. We were definitely not on the extreme side of anything as far as swing and pitch velocity. So I would be extremely cautious ever hitting with a softball bat off of a pitched ball. The bat had been holding up to front toss with baseballs up to that point though.

 

[erniekru]

DD hits baseballs as part of her lesson from front toss every week. Never had a problem with the bat, DD swings a 34-10 Fenix. As part of the same lesson, they run two machines with the dreaded dimpled machine balls at very fast speeds. Again, no problem.

But I do replace the bat 1.5 times per year, approximately 8ish months between new bats.

 

[AW95SY]

If you are hitting baseballs with a specific goal beyond "Let's see how far you can hit it" why not pick up a cheap beater BB bat? Bought my DD a -3 for overweight training, and she uses it in a dimpled ball BB cage at 70-80MPH. We don't care if it is dented, cracked, whatever, it is serving a specific purpose and at $35 may be the cheapest piece of training equipment we have. That is the bat she can go to the fields and hit rocks with, don't care. This may be why her game bat has lasted so long.

 

[3girls]

Baseballs will destroy a fastpitch bat. I don’t know the physics, but I can tell you from experience that the harder smaller balls will break your bats.

Younger kids may get away with it, but not 16+...they will break the bats fast. The kids know they aren’t allowed to hit baseballs with softball bats or softballs with baseball bats in my cage. I haven’t seen baseball bats broken like the softball bats, but it seemed fair to apply both ways.

 

[ian]

Do use your gamer softball bat for hitting buckets and buckets of baseballs in the cage.

Hitting the smaller baseballs does hone hand-eye coordination.