Simple Dimple - On Bat - Could Revolutionize American Pastime

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - There's an air of "Mr. Wizard" and "Leave It to Beaver" inside the office of Jeff Di Tullio. High-tech electronics next to model airplanes. A desk swamped in notebooks. A duffel bag filled with baseball bats.

Is this a place for work or play?

Some days it's both, says Di Tullio, 31, an instructor in aeronautics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Di Tullio has come up with an invention - a simple dimple - that could revolutionize America's favorite game.

He has patented an idea for a better baseball bat, an aerodynamically superior sports tool created by pressing hundreds of pea-size dents into the sweet spot of a traditional wooden bat. Pocking the surface reduces drag, resulting in higher bat speed, more momentum and better results, Di Tullio says.

The idea came to him one night in a traffic jam, after a day spent working on a cylinder-drag problem unrelated to sports.

After making some calculations and a few guesses about how deep and far apart the dimples should be, Di Tullio made a die and pressed dimples into wooden "blanks" (bats without the manufacturers' markings) obtained from Hillerich & Bradsby, maker of the famed Louisville Slugger.

The bats arrived in perfectly matched pairs. He modified one bat for each experiment and preserved its twin as a control.

Di Tullio says he pressed rather than drilled the dimples so he wouldn't remove any material and consequently make the bat lighter. He didn't want to change the physical properties of the equipment, just its efficiency. He used wood, although the principle applies equally well to metal bats, he says.

With his first prototype in hand, Di Tullio moved into one of MIT's wind tunnels. He attached the bat firmly to a calibrator, flipped on the 200-horsepower, six-bladed fan, and measured dynamic air pressure behind the bat using the "integral momentum theory" to calculate drag.

The dimples, he discovered, added energy to the normally sluggish air on the surface of the bat, allowing it to mix with faster-moving, high-energy air slightly above the surface and giving "the oomph" it needed to follow the contour of the bat. Although a bat may look streamlined, it really isn't.

"I was excited when I discovered I could reduce drag by as much as 60 percent," Di Tullio says.

Next, he tested his invention on semipro softball and baseball players, some from MIT. He clocked bat speed as the players swung different bats several times each. He used the data to compile statistical profiles of their swings. His conclusion: A hitter can swing a dimpled bat 3 percent to 5 percent faster, adding 10 feet to 15 feet to the trajectory of a long drive.

"It's all about bat speed, getting the bat through the hitting zone as quickly as possible. He's on to something there," says Bob Browning, manager of research for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Games resembling modern baseball have been played since the 1830s. Early bats were homemade, turned on a lathe or carved from hardwood branches that were whittled and smoothed.

When players got around to recording the rules - in Massachusetts, no less, in 1858 - bats had to be round, made of wood, not more than 2.5 inches in diameter and "any length to suit the striker."

By the time professional baseball started to be played in 1869, maximum bat length was limited to 42 inches.

From 1885 to 1893, players sometimes used bats that were flat on one side, mostly for bunting. No strategic value, but effective for deadening the ball's impact. Eventually flat bats faded out.

In 1906, inventor Emile Kinst patented a curved bat, shaped like a jai alai throwing basket and designed to whip to the ball on contact. It never caught on.

In the 1920s, a Louisville entrepreneur was granted a patent for a bat with socket-size holes designed to cut down on the incidence of foul balls. It, too, struck out.

Over the years, striped bats, milk-bottle-shaped cudgels and laminated clubs have come and gone.

About 20 years ago, hollow metal bats were introduced. Critics and enthusiasts alike agree that the elastic deformation of the metal causes the ball to "jump" off the bat, resulting in hits that fly faster and farther than shots hit with wooden bats. When the NCAA introduced metal bats for university play, team batting averages shot up 30 points and home-run production doubled, a Hillerich & Bradsby spokesman said.

While metal bats are legal in college and recreational games, they are banned by the 28 major-league and 150 minor-league teams in professional baseball.

Although not averse to new technology that improves safety, the big leagues generally frown on innovations that rely on the physical properties of a material to improve performance.

Di Tullio agrees that "people don't want to change the nature of the game and its intangibles." But his invention, he maintains, actually distills the essence of batting, often called the most difficult task in sport.

"This doesn't favor a guy who is a poor hitter," the inventor says. "It allows a hitter to use his skill more. The material doesn't do any more work. The batter gets more out of the work he puts in."

MIT's office of technology licensing, which markets 80 to 90 inventions a year, is trying to get bat manufacturers to pay attention. David McFeeters-Krone, an associate in that office, says several are "mildly interested" so far.

Is the world really ready for dimple-enhanced sluggers? A spokesman for Major League Baseball did not return repeated phone calls. Boston Red Sox players who tried Di Tullio's bats at a practice session in October felt little or no difference in the way dimpled bats performed.

Even a small improvement in bat speed is like a light-year against a fastballer like Nolan Ryan. But if Di Tullio's invention ever comes to market, weekend warriors might have the most to gain.

"We play softball here," says Hall of Fame researcher Browning. "I know my bat is pretty slow."