Acoustics engineer's work helps take the sting out of baseball bats

Acoustics faculty member Daniel Russell's work testing baseball bats has led to dampening technology to reduce painful stings when baseballs are hit the wrong way. UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. For aspiring major leaguers, one of the most painful aspects of learning the game is dealing with the sting of the bat's handle when a baseball is hit incorrectly. "If you hit the ball in the wrong place, it creates a vibration that hurts," said Daniel Russell, professor of acoustics and director of acoustics distance education at Penn State. But work by Russell is helping to soften the sting through a vibration absorber built into a bat's knob. For the acoustics faculty member, the foray into researching baseball bat stings was an accident. As a physics professor at Kettering University in Flint, Mich.