If you think of the bat as a lever, the position of the sweet spot is more dependent on the length of the bat than the thickness. Because of the distance from your hands." And if we moved all the willow closer to the hands, it's not going to mean that the ball is going to ping off the splice where the handle gets fitted in. Because that's the end of the lever, if you want to call it that.
"So just as an example - if we made a bat and we distributed all the willow to the toe, we're still not going to get the ball pinging off the toe. "The sweet spot is the centre of percussion, which is about 150-160mm from the toe up," says Lachlan Dinger, a batmaker for Kookaburra who works with Marnus Labuschagne, Glenn Maxwell, and Alyssa Healy among others. The swell acts as a kind of counterweight, it determines how easy or difficult it is to pick up the bat, rather than how hard it hits. That means there is more wood in them, and the easy assumption to make would be that the part of the bat that corresponds with the swell, the part with the most wood, is the sweet spot - but batmakers say this isn't always the case. Bats have evolved to become more curved, with pronounced swells on the back in comparison to the flatter shapes we saw until the late 1990s. In exploring the physics of a bat, we must first address the shape. A bat can get only a certain sized sweet spot." The physics of a bat don't let you achieve that. "There's no way you get a bigger sweet spot out of a bat," says James Laver, batmaker and founder of Laver & Wood. But from a technical point of view, there can only be one "best" part of the bat. So in a notional sense, commentators are right when they say sweet spots have got bigger - at least from a bowler's lens, they have reduced the margin for error. A consequence of bats getting bigger is more wood at the edges, which means miscued shots don't cause as much turning and vibration in the hands as they used to, while still carrying a fair distance. The simplest description of the sweet spot is that it is the point on the bat from which the ball rebounds with maximum acceleration and minimal vibration in the batter's hands. Commentators sometimes talk about "bigger sweet spots" on the modern bat as a reason why. The ball did go the same distance after the restrictions were put in place, and did so with increasing frequency. The one area of the bat that could not - and cannot - be legislated was the sweet spot. The laws that were eventually passed - and used to date - limited bat edges to 40mm, and maximum thickness to 67mm.
That shows how fast the change has been."
Sweet spot professional#
It is now an average, in professional cricket, of 35-40mm and sometimes up to 60mm.
"It was pointed out to us that, in 1905, the width of bats was 16mm and that, by 1980, it had increased to 18mm. "The time has come to restrict the size of bat edges and the overall width of bats," said Mike Brearley, chairman of the MCC committee when they came up with the proposals to restrict bat dimensions. Warner's wasn't the only big bat going around at the time, but it was the most conspicuous. Warner's Gray-Nicolls bat at the time, aptly named Kaboom, was an object of focus: it was reportedly 85mm deep at the point on its back where the spine was furthest from the face, and the edges were at least 50mm thick, probably closer to 60mm. That was David Warner in 2017, as the MCC was deliberating on bat sizes.
"And, you know what, the ball's still going to go the same distance."
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