Splat the rat: church fete on St Marys

I loved this game at the church fete on St Marys in the Isles of Scilly. The lady dropped the sock rat down the pipe and the idea was to pin it against the board at the bottom using the bat. It was almost impossible. The angle of the pipe was about 60 degrees so the component of acceleration due to gravity would be 9.81*cos(60) = 5 m/s/s. The pipe was about 2 metres long. By applying the equations of constant acceleration s=ut+1/2 at^2 gives time t = 0.9 seconds assuming negligible friction. Human reaction time is maybe 0.2 seconds so it might be possible but she was very clever at disguising the actual time of release so the task becomes very hard.