Tabletop experiment to determine the center of percussion of a baseball bat.

The article focuses on the concept of the center of percussion (CoP) and its application to baseball bats, where it corresponds to the "sweet spot"—the point on the bat that maximizes energy transfer to the ball while minimizing force felt by the batter's hands. It presents a tabletop experimental model using an instrumented baseball bat suspended on a cart and a controlled ball launcher, equipped with an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) to collect and analyze data for visually identifying the CoP. The study validates the CoP concept on a uniform beam with a known analytical solution and then applies a coarse and fine search method to locate the CoP on a non-uniform baseball bat, finding it experimentally at approximately 12 cm from the bat's handle end in the setup. The paper also discusses historical background, the physics underlying the CoP, and potential future work including hand-held bat scenarios and vibrational analysis to better understand the sweet spot in practical use.