New USA Bats Reviews: Which One Should You Buy

The new USA bats are finally for sale.

There is nothing that keeps a youth baseball parent up at night more than making sure his or her player has the right bat. Last year, during the Christmas sales on USA bats, when my older son was 10U (about to play up in 11U), I bought him:

• The next-size-up Rawlings USA Quatro 
• A Marucci USSSA CAT (for “bring-it-and-swing-it” tournaments) -and- 
• A heavier and longer USSSA Easton model for winter practice (his “practice bat”)

The Easton one proved to be too long, so my son wound up never using it for practice. The team never entered a bring-it-and-swing-it tournament, so we never used the CAT. And the Quatro was still too big when the season started. After all that, I wound up making an emergency purchase of a pricey Easton ADV 360 drop 11.

Four bats, a thousand dollars spent, only one used.

Luckily, I have a younger son, so I tell myself that I’m really buying all these USA bats at fifty percent off.

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2021 Rawlings Quatro

Our former baseball coach sold us his son’s yellow 2018 Quatro for $80 for the start of the fall season when my son was 9U. I  thought it was a great deal until I found out the coach had bought it used himself for less than $80.

Going from a mid-tier USA bat to the Quatro was a godsend for us, and my son started driving the ball consistently to the outfield. His coach also moved him up in the lineup of our club team. But also during this time, my son started doing a better job staying back and not lunging at the ball. It’s always the unanswerable question of how much of the results are actually due to a particular bat as opposed to it being just incidental.

Anyway, because of that yellow model that served us well, I have lingering positive feelings about the Quatro. But was there really any reason to buy the newest Quatro, which was retailing for over $350. I went on the Rawlings website, where they let me compare the 2021 and 2020 models. They’re basically the same, with identical composite material, two-piece construction, Lizard Skin grips, and drop options (-12, -10, and -8).

For “technology”:

• The new Quatro is a “Composite Multi-Disc System”
• Last year’s Quatro is “Focused Flex: Reconstructed collar assembly for a stiffer, focused flex eliminating barrel drag while maintaining vibration reduction qualities”

I could be wrong, but I think that’s just different marketing speak and not a significant substantive difference.

So it seems that the major difference between the two bats is one is gray (2021), and the other is a medicinal-looking red (2020).

2021 EASTON ADV 360

When this baseball bat came out last year, it was hailed on a lot of sites as the number one of all the USA bats on the market, and Easton’s first real push into the USA bats space. The hype was so compelling that I bought one right before the season for my older son. I then wound up going into my backyard and hitting off a tee with it myself into a net to make sure the “composite fibers” were properly broken in before my son’s first baseball game.

This bat was meh. It was solid, don’t get me wrong, and he got some big hits with it. But they had billed the bat as being almost as powerful as a USSSA bat, and that was major puffery. When my son swings his USSSA CAT in practice, he can pull the ball over the 200-feet outfield fences. However, when he switches to the ADV 360, he loses maybe 35-40 feet of distance on his shots.

I hate to sound so negative about this bat, because we did have a good year with it, but the promise of it being head-and-shoulders better than the Quatro didn’t bear out and left me disappointed.

Like with the Quatro, this year’s ADV 360 model doesn’t seem to be substantively different from last year’s model.

2021 DeMarini Zen  

We’ve never swung a DeMarini, so in my mind it might be the best of the USA bats on the market, the one my son might pick up and immediately click with and start hitting bombs. You never know. I actually did buy a DeMarini once, secondhand, from a father on my son’s club team last year. It was in a sad condition, chipped all over, and missing an end cap.

The father told me he’d sell it to me for $16. When I told him I only had a twenty, he gladly snapped up the bill and didn’t give me change.  I tried to get my son to try it out in practice, but it was so bedraggled he resisted and I could accept the $20 sunk cost.

So for this year, I was itching to buy the new DeMarini Zen, priced at a perfectly reasonable $350. It didn’t seem much different from last year’s Zen, but like with an iPhone or Ipad you always want the new one just in case there is some significant difference you are overlooking.

Waiting for a Dick’s Sale on USA Bats  

I forced myself to wait to make the purchase until Dick’s Black Friday sales, only to find out that the huge store-wide discount didn’t apply to this year’s high-end bats! Cyber Monday sales had the same exclusion.

I found other smaller discounts I could apply, and was all set to make the purchase, when I showed a picture of the bat to my son and asked if it looked like something he would want.

“Why can’t I just use my bat from last year?” my son asked.

At the end of the fall season last year, he had finally started using the Quatro I had bought him last Christmas and done quite well, but it was an old bat now and there was nothing particularly special about it.

“Are you sure you don’t want this one?” I asked, pointing him again to the shiny DeMarini.

“I want to use the one from last year,” he said.

The Winner

So after all that handwringing, I’m going to be a kind dad and give him this one, and let him start with the old Quatro. However, don’t think for a second I won’t make a change if he starts off the season 0 for 3.

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What do you think of the new stable of USA bats? Share your thoughts in the comments.