Baseball/Softball Preview 2011
The Mighty Bat of Whitney Shaw
The Harvard women’s softball team is no exception, looking to a hitter with offensive prowess of her own: Whitney Shaw.
Working on a Changeup
But that wasn’t quite true for Harvard last year. Despite boasting the best team ERA in the Ancient Eight, the Crimson fell to Cornell—number two by the same metric—in a deciding third game of the Ivy League Championship a season ago.
Going Batty: NCAA Power Outage
The new testing system is called the Bat-Ball Coefficient of Restitution, or BBCOR. Unlike the previous Ball Exit Speed Ratio (BESR) standard that measured the exit speed of the ball compared to the incoming ball speed and swing speed, BBCOR measures what the ball and bat do on actual impact. In essence, BBCOR measures the “bounciness” of the ball when it comes into contact with a bat. When a ball hits an aluminum bat, the barrel compresses a small amount, causing the ball to “bounce” back quickly. This is known as the trampoline effect. In order to reduce the significance of the trampoline effect, NCAA regulations prohibit a bat from having a BBCOR coefficient higher than 0.500, which is about the same as a wooden bat.
Youth Movement
Last year, the Crimson fell just short of winning the Ivy League Championship in a single-run loss to Cornell. Harvard looks to make this the year that it takes it all.
