Posted on 04/02/2025 2:25:21 PM PDT by BenLurkin
If you were making a bowling pin on a lathe and suddenly decided to make a baseball bat instead, the result would look something like the "torpedo bat" that is the talk of MLB's new season. After some New York Yankees used the unusual bats to launch a barrage of home runs on opening weekend, scientists who study baseball quickly took notice.
"The same bat design has been in existence for a century and a half, maybe," says Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. "And to come up with something new, to me, is always very exciting."
Nathan and other experts say they're fascinated that the hype is over the shape of a hunk of wood, one that even baseball's rulebook calls a "stick."
"There's just not a whole lot you can do with this stuff," Lloyd Smith, a professor of mechanical engineering at Washington State University, tells NPR. He says he usually finds wood a bit boring — but he adds that in this case, "I was proven wrong."
The logic behind the torpedo bats seems deceptively simple: Their bulbous shape comes from analyzing how hitters tend to make contact with the ball.
"If they're making contact at the same place in the barrel all the time, what can we do about the bat to try and give them better performance at that specific location?" says Dan Russell, an acoustics professor at Penn State University.
Russell, Smith, and Nathan weren't involved in designing the new bats. But they have a long history of studying how baseball works, including a collaboration studying illegal "corked" bats.
The torpedo bats are legal, conforming to MLB's rule 3.02, which 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."
As for weight, Babe Ruth famously used bats weighing more than 40 ounces — but the current norm is around 31 or 32 ounces, similar to the 33 ounces wielded by Hank Aaron, according to the Louisville Slugger Museum.
Torpedo bat designs can reduce weight, a crucial component as batters face pitchers throwing baseballs faster than ever. So, why hasn't anyone tried the approach before in baseball — a sport famous for its obsession with metrics?
"The guy who had the idea, of course, has a physics background," Nathan says. "So that's why I am, in a way, I'm jealous."
The guy in question is Aaron Leanhardt, a former MIT physicist who became a Yankees analyst and now works for the Miami Marlins. He's credited with driving the new design.
Torpedo bats broke an 'unwritten rule' in design For a sense of how a torpedo shape might help a batter, consider modern "cupped" bats, their barrels ending with a deep indentation rather than a rounded curve.
"That's important weight" to eliminate, Smith says. "That's at the end of the bat — that's going to be much more important than weight near the handle. It makes the bat a little easier to swing."
"You want to remove the weight where it doesn't do you any good," Nathan says. "Now the next logical step is not only to remove weight but move it somewhere else. So that is the next logical step."
To take that step, the torpedo designers broke what Smith calls an unwritten rule: For decades, a bat's diameter basically increased from the handle to the barrel, never decreasing until rounding off at the end.
Torpedo bats' diameters widen, but then they narrow, bringing a number of dynamics into play. On an essential level, Nathan says, moving weight from the end of the bat closer to the hands reduces "what's called the swing weight or in technical language, the moment of inertia of the bat, making it easier to swing, easier to control."
Another potential benefit, he adds, is if the design allows a bat to have a slightly wider diameter in a batter's favored location without adding to the swing weight.
"Then the advantage is having a larger surface over which to make contact with the ball," he says.
But the torpedo design doesn't necessarily translate to more power at the plate.
"If you lower the swing weight, you increase your swing speed," which is "super important for batted ball speed" and hitting the ball farther, Smith says. The tradeoff, he adds, is that by lowering a bat's swing weight, "you swing the bat faster, but you have less mass to hit the ball with."
To picture how that works, we should visualize a sledgehammer, according to Scott Drake, president of PFS-TECO, a wood products company that inspects bats used in the MLB.
"If you could swing a sledgehammer really fast and make contact with the ball right at the head, it's going to go really far," Drake says. Of course, it would be difficult to swing a sledgehammer with that much speed and accuracy.
If you slide the weight down the handle toward your hands, he says, it becomes easier and easier to swing faster — "but when you make contact on the end, there's less and less mass for where you make contact."
"For the average person, what it means is if you lower the swing weight of a bat, your batted ball speed goes down a little bit," Smith says.
Of course, major league hitters are not average people. But it's worth noting that of the Yankees' nine home runs last Saturday, three were hit by Aaron Judge — using his normal, non-torpedo bat.
Russell, Smith and Nathan say they're eager to conduct tests on the new bats to see how they balance those competing factors — and how the design affects a bat's "sweet spot," where the collision of bat and ball is most efficient.
So, do the bats give hitters an edge? "I don't think it's hitting the ball any faster," Russell says of the torpedo bat. But, along with the potential gains in bat control, he and his colleagues believe the bats might boost a less measurable factor: batters' confidence.
"The game of baseball is so superstitious," Russell says. "It doesn't matter what the thing is, if you found something that makes you more confident, it's going to work."
That dynamic extends from the batter's box out to the mound, where pitchers are likely to see more batters holding oddly swollen bats.
"I'm sure the pitchers are going, 'What the heck is that thing?' " Russell says.
While the Yankees are drawing headlines for using torpedo bats, players on at least eight MLB teams have tried the bats, from the Chicago Cubs to the Tampa Bay Rays in batting practice, spring training or the regular season. Several of baseball's 41 approved bat suppliers are making versions of them, from Louisville Slugger and Victus to Chandler and Authentic.
"If all of the manufacturers aren't already making them, I'm sure they will be soon," Russell says.
Without reading I would surmise the mass is concentrated at a single point. Less contact, less absorption of kinetic energy.
Here is how they work. The ball comes off of the bat and is hit to a place where Aaron Judge drops it.
...Aaron Leanhardt, the field coordinator for the Miami Marlins, is the mastermind behind the torpedo bat. You can watch the full 8-minute interview recorded by Kevin Barral of our sister sister Fish on First. Otherwise, here are some takeaways:
His background is in physics and electrical engineering, and he has a PhD from MIT.
The idea took more than two years to get to this point.
He credits the batters, not the bats.
The bat was first utilized in 2023 (he wouldn’t say by whom), at both the minor- and major-league levels. It was tested as early as 2022, but not in regular-season games.
The industry was more aware of players trending toward using these bats than the media and general public were; this didn’t sneak up on teams or players.
Leanhardt points out that traditional bats are at their thickest at the end instead of at the barrel, which is where players are trying to make contact...
?
This bat is unlikely to be used by the high average base hitters due to their relying on the entire barrel length for their hits.......
LOL. Gee, make an error in a World Series game, and it draws a lot of attention......
Not saying they’d work better, but I wonder if cricket bats would be allowed.
I remember bats like that from when I was a kid.
Don’t remember actually swinging one.
My favorite bat in high school was a Wally Moon model.
The early baseball bats were longer and heavier. They often have little taper over their lengths and look more like a modern softball bat than they do a modern baseball bat. The knobs have all sorts of shapes.
I had a ca.1860 decorated one (for a league championship) that I consigned to an auction. It would gag most here if I told you what it sold for.
My guess is it widens the sweet spot a little
Ah, they answered my question (that’s what comes of reading the article): “The bat shall be a smooth, round stick not more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part . . .”
Disappointed in what a physics professor would come up with.
What the bottle bat does (and the design was quite common in the early Babe Roth era) ismove the center of percussion more inward on the handle, closer to the label where many batters make, or try to make, the impact point on the ball.
It is the point where all energy is focused on the impact point with the ball, and little or none of the energy wasted on the hand holding point. That’s what is amplified when you hit the ball back on the handle, especially on a cold day when it stings.
Energy wasted elsewhere on the bat other than that center of percussion ( the sweet spot) is energy not imparted to the ball.
The real question, as any engineering student would tell you, is why hasn’t bat design done this years ago.
I wonder how the bats would work if Ángel Hernández was working the plate, calling balls and strikes? Never mind, he retired.
...I mean, we know how moonbat’s work.
“When you want a great night, go straight for the Hiney”
I hope they used that line.
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