BMH - Question on how you determine a bat is a defect around weight?

[brianborsch]

Hello Brian,

When determining a bat a defect by weight, how much variance do you allow? Say a player requests 31 ounces, but it is 31.5 ounces, or even vice versa, when do you all draw the line and decide to send the bat as a BPA bat for minor leaguers?

BB

[BMH]

For major league bats the cut off is a .5oz. Now some players will request a tighter variance so we'll go +/- .3oz. Some will say order a 31.5oz but will only want bats in the 31.5-32oz range.

Minor league guys had been +/- 1oz for years but it too is now .5oz.

It also depends on how many they order. Say it's an order for 12 bats and two of them are out of spec. We'll go ahead and send the two. If it's say 12 bats and eight of them are out of spec we will rerun them.

[brianborsch]

Hey Brian,

One last question on this. If a bat has everything that checks out (date weight length stamped under the knob, no underline under the 125, etc) and it doesn't have the model under the knob in pen, then could it still be a reject bat of the player?

BB

[BMH]

It's possible, but we try to write the model on all the knobs when they go into BPAS. We've been making a lot of rejects here of late, learning to have tighter tolerances.

[brianborsch]

Can you tell me the manufacture dates for all of Evan Longoria's reject bats for this year? If so that would help! Thanks!

BB

[BMH]

Oh boy...we don't keep track of when we make the mistakes. There were if I was to guess at least two dozen in BPAS. We had a lot of them. It's amazing what we go through to keep a player happy.