Engineering the Perfect Baseball Bat, With Hopes of Shattering a World Record

In the major leagues, the hundreds of baseball bats swung every day in stadiums across the country are tightly regulated. Corkers seeking an extra bit of oomph are suspended and shamed, and everyone’s on a level playing field.

But thankfully, the same rules do not apply to Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin parkway, where Phillies slugger Jimmy Rollins, using a specially engineered bat, recently made a run at Babe Ruth’s Guinness world record for the longest home-run ever hit.

PopSci’s Matt Cokeley was on hand to explain the physics behind Rollins’s scientifically juiced bat, made from a special mix of composite materials. Rollins may have came up a bit short of the Babe’s 575-foot record, but as you can see in the video clip above, the specially engineered bat resulted in a still-mammoth 463-foot blast–40 more feet than Jimmy’s career longest dinger. Not bad!