It was discovered on 21 February 1980, by astronomer Zdeňka Vávrová at the Kleť Observatory in the Czech Republic.
[1] This minor planet was named in memory of Tomáš Baťa (1876–1932), a world-renowned Czech businessman and founder of the Bata Shoe Organization.
[11] This spectral type is typical in the outermost asteroid belt and often found in the Jupiter trojan population.
In April 2004, a rotational lightcurve of Baťa was obtained from photometric observations by astronomers at the Palomar Transient Factory in California.
Lightcurve analysis gave a rotation period of 10.571±0.2523 hours with a high brightness amplitude of 0.62 magnitude, indicative of an elongated, non-spherical shape (U=2).