How We Test & Score Baseball & Softball Bats

Here’s what most bat review scoring actually measures: exit velocity. A test hitter takes 20 swings. The bat with the highest exit velo wins. Clean data, easy to visualize, impossible to argue with — and almost completely useless for recommending a bat to an actual player.

Why? Exit velocity tests using a standard hitter always favour end-loaded bats. For a physically strong power hitter who barrels it up consistently, that’s real. For a smaller contact hitter who needs bat speed above all else? That end-loaded bat is working against them, and the exit velo test just told them to buy it anyway. That’s problem one. Here are the others.

We built our methodology to fix all four of these — and it applies the same way whether the bat is a BBCOR, USSSA, USA, Fastpitch, or Slowpitch certification.

Before we score anything, we collect data from multiple independent sources. We’re tracking what players actually experience with a bat over a full season — not just what the spec sheet says or what it felt like in a one-day cage session.

We don’t take bats from manufacturers. We don’t have affiliate relationships that obligate us to rate anything positively. Every bat we recommend, we’d buy with our own money and hand to a player we know.

Every bat is scored across 6 criteria. Sub-criteria are scored independently first — the category total is their average, not a number we picked and reverse-engineered. The framework applies identically across baseball (BBCOR, USSSA, USA) and softball (Fastpitch, Slowpitch) certifications.

This is the part of bat reviews that most sites skip, and it’s the part that matters most to the player actually buying the bat. Every single review on this site includes a player-type routing statement — not “this bat works for most players,” an actual If-Then call.

A repaint is a current-year bat that uses the same core technology as the previous year — same barrel construction, same handle, same connection piece — with a new colorway and sometimes minor cosmetic additions. Repaints aren’t inherently bad. If the previous year’s bat was great, the current version probably is too.

The problem is when manufacturers charge a significant premium for what is functionally the same bat, and review sites give the new colorway a fresh enthusiastic score without noting that you could buy the prior version at clearance prices and get identical performance.

When we identify a repaint, we say so directly in the review. We note the previous year’s model, the price difference at clearance, and whether the performance score should transfer. If the tech is identical, the score is identical — and we’ll tell you to skip the new colorway and save the money.

Durability is the only scoring category that keeps updating after we publish. Most review sites score durability at launch, based on first impressions and early reviews. That’s not durability data — that’s hope. Real durability shows up at 60 days, at 90 days, at a full season. That’s when cracking patterns emerge, barrel denting shows up, end caps start loosening.

Every time we review a current-year bat, we ask one question: is the previous year’s model still available at clearance, and does it use the same core technology?

Value picks go in their own section in roundups. They’re explicitly framed as “same tech, lower price” — not primary recommendations, but real options that belong in front of anyone making a purchasing decision.

We know other ratings on most bats run higher than ours. Here’s exactly why that happens — and why our approach produces scores worth using.

We don’t receive free bats from manufacturers. We don’t have paid placement deals. We don’t have relationships that require us to keep scores in a range that keeps brand partners happy. If a bat scores 6.0 with us, it scored 6.0 because that’s what the criteria produced — not because we’re being difficult or contrarian. And if a bat scores 9.2, it earned it the same way.