A weirdly shaped bat has taken the baseball world by storm.
In the opening weekend of the 2024 Major League Baseball season (March 27-30), the New York Yankees slugged a mind-boggling 15 home runs in a three-game series against the Milwaukee Brewers. Nine of them were hit with “torpedo” bats.
Since then, hitters across the league have experimented with these bats. Many have raved about them. “It feels like we’re playing wiffle ball out there…,” Yankee third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr told reporters.
But how do torpedo bats work? Are they really better?
All about sweet spot
Every bat has a “sweet spot” (scientifically, the “centre of percussion”). In simple terms, hitting the ball at the sweet spot minimises vibration of the bat, and thus maximises the energy delivered to the ball. A bat’s sweet spot is determined by its shape, size, and distribution of mass.
All baseball bats are made of a homogenous piece of wood. They have traditionally been thin at the bottom (where the bat is held), and wider at the top (the barrel) where the bat is supposed to make contact with the ball. The increase in the width of the barrel is usually uniform.
This means that bats are, by design, top heavy. While they may come in various lengths, the average bat is 30 to 31 inches long (roughly 76 to 79 cm), with the sweet spot located 5 to 7 inches from the barrel’s end.
Developed in 2022 by Aaron Leanhardt, a physicist from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who at the time was working in the Yankees’ player development department, the torpedo bat beefs up the sweet spot.
“It’s just about making the bat as heavy and as fat as possible in the area where you’re trying to do damage on the baseball,” Leanhardt, who now works for the Miami Marlins, told The Athletic.
More power, more control
Compared to a traditional bat which gets thicker as one moves away from the handle, torpedo bats are slightly girthier in the middle before tapering off at the end of the barrel, similar to the shape of bowling pins. This does two things.
FIRST, it improves the quality of contact a hitter makes with the ball. Hitters not only have a greater margin of error to hit the sweet spot, given that there is more wood (mass) there, they are also likely to connect better when they hit.
SECOND, the shape brings the centre of mass closer to the handle of the bat, reducing its “swing weight”. Think about the difference between swinging an axe (where all the mass is concentrated on one end) and swinging a sword (where the weight of the handle brings the centre of mass closer to where one holds the weapon). Even if the two weapons weigh the same, the sword will be much easier to wield.
“Personally, the weight is closer to my hands, so I feel as if it’s lighter in a way. For me, that was the biggest benefit. Obviously, the bigger the sweet spot, the bigger the margin for error,” Yankees outfielder and former MVP Cody Bellinger told MLB.com about torpedo bats.
Not a silver bullet
Many people have questioned torpedo bats’ legality — wrongly. MLB rule 3.02 states: “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.” Torpedo bats meet all these criteria.
Others have welcomed these bats as a game-changer for offences, which have historically suffered from the analytics boom in baseball. But things are not that simple.
Every hitter is unique in terms of how he swings the bat, where he hits the ball, etc. A bat that works for one hitter, may not work for another. Indeed, torpedo bats are customised for individual players, based on data about their swing and contact points. Nonetheless, their shape means that they are likely to most benefit a certain type of player, one who has a tendency to hit balls closer to the handle. This is the spot that is bulkier in torpedo bats.
While teams around the league have long known about torpedo bats, their adoption has been far from universal. “I think if you were around the clubhouse [of] all 30 teams, you would see a guy or two that’s kind of adopting a bat that’s kind of fashioned more specifically to their swing,” Baltimore Orioles coach Cody Asche to MLB.com.
Even the Yankees, whose offensive boom brought the bat under the spotlight, have not universally taken to torpedo bats. Two-time MVP Aaron Judge, arguably the best hitter in baseball, hit three homers in a single game against the Brewers with a traditional bat. “Why try to change something that works,” he said when asked about his choice of bat.
Many experts believe that while torpedo bats may give batters a brief advantage, pitchers will eventually adjust, perhaps by throwing further away from the batter, where the barrel is thinner. As always, baseball will remain a cat-and-mouse game between bat and ball.
Jazz Chisholm Jr (left) after hitting a home run with a torpedo bat. Note how the bat is thicker in the middle and tappered at the barrel’s end. (X/@Yankees) 
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