By Charlie Teljeur
Leave it to the New York Yankees to make the biggest splash of the year in baseball. In just the second game of the season, the Yankees hit a total of nine home runs.
They took Milwaukee Brewers’ starter Nelson Cortes deep on the first three pitches of the game – which is a first for Major League Baseball – and would add another in the first, and five more home runs by the end of the seventh, in a 20-9 rout.
The onslaught was impressive, but it’s what helped cause it that became the talk of baseball.
For that you can thank – or blame, if you’re the Milwaukee Brewers – the torpedo bat, the latest in baseball equipment innovation.
Five of the nine homers hit that day came off a torpedo bat. That includes three of the four 1st inning homeruns, and, for the record, Aaron Judge was not using one when he hit his in the historic first inning (like he needs any help).
What makes the torpedo bat so special?
Unlike a traditional bat which gets thicker as it reaches the end, the torpedo version has its sweet spot closer to the handle, which makes it look similar to the design of a bowling pin.
The logic behind the design being that it allows for better contact on mishits, effectively giving the hitter more room for error. Funny enough that thinking is exactly how the torpedo came into being, at least for the Yankees this season.
Word has it that the team’s analytics department had counselled players on where pitches tended to strike their bats, and with subsequent buy-in from some of the players, bats had been designed around that information.
Aaron Leanhardt, a former Yankees front-office staffer who now works for the Miami Marlins, developed the torpedo barrel to bring more mass to a bat’s sweet spot.
Former Yankees infielder Kevin Smith, who was with the team during the bat’s early development, is a fan of the new technology.
“You’re going up with a weapon that can be better. Your just misses could be clips, your clips could be flares, and your flares could be barrels (solid hits). And it was true; it’s fractions of an inch on the barrel differentiating these outcomes.”
Even though the nine home run game thrust the new bat design into the mainstream, this bat shape has actually been around since 2021. Batmakers Hillerich & Bradsby had nondisclosure agreements with four teams as the bat evolved although back then it was referred to as the “bowling pin” bat.
Gradually, as the bat’s design evolved by utilizing valuable feedback, more players became interested in experimenting with the new technology to the point where the bat launched itself into the baseball zeitgeist with a formidable bang.
What I find particularly interesting about the torpedo’s development is baseball’s recent newfound interest in toying with tradition which notably includes other things like pitch clocks and extra inning rule changes.
It’s not that all of these changes are necessarily good for the game, but by slaying its sacred cows, baseball is trying to advance the game in unprecedented ways. It’s actually quite amazing that something so simple as redesigning the traditional bat hasn’t really been tried before, given Major League Baseball’s relatively uncomplicated bat rules.
They state that “the bat shall be a smooth, round stick not more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length. The bat shall be one piece of solid wood.”
Beyond that, the only other meaningful stipulation is that all experimental models must be approved by MLB.
Seems simple enough, so what took so long?
This is not to say I’m the type that demands change. In fact, I’d side with being more of a traditionalist when it comes to “advancing” sports through rule and equipment alterations because it could turn out to be a very risky venture.
By trying to attract new fans through dramatic changes, you might end up alienating the ones you already have. Thus, it’s a fine line you walk and, because of that, it’s the very essence of the need you must protect most.
Changing the bat’s design, within the parameters of the rules as they exist, is precisely a logical way you can improve baseball, and this is the type of creative energy the game needs.
Changing a bat’s design is a move aimed at both camps. It advances the sport while also keeping it familiar. And in the end, some will like it and some won’t.
Interestingly, that’s a sentiment echoed by the best power hitter in the game today when asked if he would adopt the torpedo bat.
Judge, who hit an American League-record 62 homers in 2022 and 58 last year en route to his second AL MVP award, doesn’t see a need to experiment.
“The past couple of seasons kind of speak for itself,” Judge said a day after his third career three-homer game. “Why try to change something?”