Quick Take
USSSA bats consistently outperform USA bats, offering a 5 to 10% improvement in exit speed and total distance. This performance gap is attributed to differences in design standards, making USSSA bats a preferred choice for players seeking maximum power.
In short, any decent USSSA bat will outperform a USA Bat by a considerable margin. While it depends on several factors, you should expect a 5 to 10% improvement in total distance and exit speeds. (That is, a 200-foot shot is now a 210 to 220-foot shot).
The average of all our exit speeds we gathered for performance bats in the category show this:
- 2019 USSSA vs 2019 USA gives a 5% improvement for USSSA.
- 2018 USSSA vs 2018 USA gives an 8% improvement to USSSA.
Testing USSSA and USA Comparisons
Comparing bats is no easy task. Too many pseudo-scientists in the blog sphere put together some exit speed test and think they’ve cracked the code. But comparing one bat to another is anything but an apples-to-apples comparison, even if you can control for things like swing speed, hitter confidence, and ball type.
Swing weight, something you can’t easily control (because swing weights are hard to find), dramatically changes results. To say nothing of the fact that you can’t find a single bat that is representative of the whole. Who’s to say, for example, that Easton’s Ghost in USSSA is the same level of the bat as the USA Version? Taking two bats to the field, as we do in the video, and then making sweeping statements about USA vs. USSSA bats is unfair at best.
Measurements
In other words, we can’t quite measure the exact difference between the USA and USSSA bats because it is impossible to change a bat from one to the other and do a test.
As we point out above, our collective exit speed tests show a 3 to 8% improvement between USA and USSSA Bats. Further evidence can be found in our conversation about the lack of home runs in the LLWS.
