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Top Comments: What is a torpedo bat? [1]
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Date: 2025-04-04
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Sheeeeeesh, leave to the New York Yankees to start a trend.
Madison Williams/Sports Illustrated
Torpedo bats have taken the MLB world by storm in just the week or so since Opening Day. The New York Yankees, who started using these specialized bats this season, have already hit 22 home runs since Thursday, May 27. The Yankees' 17 homers in four games even made an MLB record. So, it's understandable if other MLB teams became interested in acquiring these torpedo bats themselves. And, it sounds like the other teams acted fast in adding the bats to their stock.
What is a torpedo bat, exactly?
For that story, we’ll go to Jeff Passan of ESPN.
An MIT-educated physics professor at the University of Michigan for seven years, [Aaron] Leanhardt left academia for athletics specifically to solve these sorts of problems. And as he spoke with more players, the framework of a solution began to reveal itself. With strikeouts at an all-time high, hitters wanted to counter that by making more contact. And the easiest way to do so, Leanhardt surmised, was to increase the size of the barrel on their bat. Elongating the barrel -- the fat part of the bat that generates the hardest and most contact -- sounded great in theory. Doing so in practice, though, would increase the weight of the bat and slow down swing speed, negating the gains a larger sweet spot would provide. [...] The answer led to what could be the most consequential development in bat technology since a generation ago when players forsook ash bats for maple. The creation of the bowling pin bat (also known as the torpedo bat) optimizes the most important tool in baseball by redistributing weight from the end of the bat toward the area 6 to 7 inches below its tip, where major league players typically strike the ball. Doing so takes an apparatus that for generations has looked the same and gives it a fun-house-mirror makeover, with the fat part of the bat more toward the handle and the end tapering toward a smaller diameter, like a bowling pin. [...] TO UNDERSTAND HOW the bowling pin bat works is a lesson in physics. Take a sledgehammer and a broom handle. The sledgehammer will be more difficult to swing because much of its weight is distributed to the tip. The broom handle, meanwhile, can be swung with immense speed but doesn't contain significant mass. If the length and weight of bats are constants, the distribution of mass is the variable -- and Leanhardt conceived of a bat that optimizes both so it can do the most damage.
So science education and expertise— expertise at most anything, really— is good for something after all, amirite?
Back to SI’s Madison Williams
ESPN recently spoke to Bobby Hillerich, vice president of production at Hillerich & Bradsby which makes Louisville Slugger bats, about the surge of torpedo bats this season. He admitted that all 30 MLB teams had requested the bats by the middle of this week, after the Yankees' nine home run game last Saturday against the Milwaukee Brewers. [...] "Every team started trying to get orders in," Hillerich said. "We're trying to scramble to get wood. And then it was: How fast can we get this to retail?" The Cincinnati Reds specifically asked Hillerich & Bradsby for the bats for Monday's game vs. the Texas Rangers. Some of the workers drove to Cincinnati to have star Elly de la Cruz test out the torpedo bats. He ended up using one on Monday night and hit two home runs and produced seven RBIs. [...] It sounds like the torpedo bats are here to stay in MLB, especially since every single team has shown interest in at least learning more about what these bats can do. This may not be the end of the evolution of bats in the MLB, either.
I do appreciate the ingenuity and expertise that went into this particular tool for baseball players. It’s too bad that scientific progress and innovation has been devalued by much of the American public nowadays, in matters great and even a small matter such as this.
As a personal matter when it comes to baseball, I’ve always preferred pitching duels and low-scoring complete games to home-run fests. Maybe scientists will work on innovative (but legal) baseballs in response.
In fact, I would bet that exactly that would happen.
Comments below the fold.
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