On Saturday, the New York Yankees provided the most potent product placement since Ashton Hall’s viral video of his morning ritual caused a spike in sales of Saratoga Spring Water. True to their nickname, the Bombers bashed a franchise-record nine home runs, as several of their hitters swung a new kind of bat. It’s quickly come to be called the torpedo bat, but it really resembles a bowling pin, with less of a taper to it than a traditional bat and a longer, thicker barrel that’s closer to the handle. The Yankees’ bats have long been big in a figurative sense, but now their lumber—like their bodies—is also physically large.
A mixture of veteran and younger Yankees used the bat—Paul Goldschmidt, Cody Bellinger, Jazz Chisholm, Austin Wells, Anthony Volpe—as the Yankees trounced the Brewers. In less than the four minutes that Ashton Hall’s time stamps said it took for him to dive into his pool, the Yankees hit three homers, becoming the first team on record to go yard on each of the first three pitches of a game, and the third to launch nine or more big flies in a game.
It must be the bats, right? Well, the bats may have helped—the Yankees had to swing something—but the bigger barrels didn’t do it alone. As Brewers manager Pat Murphy said, “It ain’t the wand; it’s the magician.” Or, as roughed-around Brewers starter (and ex-Yankee) Nestor Cortes said, “I think those were gonna go out regardless if they had a [bowling] pin bat or a regular bat.” Yankee Stadium is a bandbox, the wind was blowing out, and Aaron Judge hit three of those nine homers using the same boring old bat he used to club 62 in 2022 and 58 last year. Nobody brought up the bats when the Yankees scored four runs on Opening Day, or when they were using them during spring training, or even last season, when some of their hitters first tried them. (Including, evidently, during their October World Series run.) The bats popped off, so to speak, after Michael Kay mentioned them on Saturday’s broadcast, when the Yankees were up 4-3.
The Yankees went on to win that game 20-9, then hit four more homers on Sunday to complete the sweep and come one tater short of the record for the most in a two-game span. Naturally, the bats have become the talk of baseball.
Upon beholding the girthy wood, many batsmen immediately developed bat envy and said they’d be eager to try them. Brewers reliever Trevor Megill, by contrast, said, “I think it’s terrible. I feel like it’s something used in slow-pitch softball.” However, he also said it’s genius, and that while “it might be bush [league], it might not be.” (Megill may need to think this through further.) As for fans, some social media sentiments seem to suggest that the bulked-up barrels are gimmicky, unfair, or even illegal. It probably doesn’t help the new bats’ reputation that they’re most associated with the sport’s traditional villains, or that most people’s first exposure to the concept came after a historic offensive display that made them seem super-overpowered and potentially game breaking.
Here’s my take: Don’t damn the torpedoes. Just let the hitters have their bulbous bats. They need all the help they can get.
We can easily dispense with the cheating talk. Experimental bats must get approval from the MLB rules committee before they can be used in games, and the league has confirmed that these bats are up to code. The rule book doesn’t have that much to say about bat specs beyond this: “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.” Check, check, and check.
The bats are largely the brainchild of Aaron Leanhardt, a.k.a Lenny, a former Yankees analyst with a PhD in physics from MIT. The impetus for the redesign, the bowling pin proselytizer told ESPN’s Jeff Passan, was that “players were frustrated by the fact that pitching had gotten so good.” Lenny now works for the Marlins, who’ve hit two home runs in four games and could definitely use better bat technology to compensate for not having hitters with power. (They’re gonna need a bigger bat.)
“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,” Lenny told The Athletic, explaining that the thought process was “why don’t we exchange how much wood we’re putting on the tip versus how much we’re putting in the sweet spot? Just try to take all that excess weight and try to put it where you’re trying to hit the ball and then in exchange try to take the thinner diameter that used to be at the sweet spot and put that on the tip.” (Phrasing.) That way, he said, “You can get some gains without actually making sacrifices.” It’s basically body recomposition, but for bats.
Improbably, no one was talking publicly about torpedo bats before Saturday, even though Giancarlo Stanton reportedly used them during his dominant October last year. But the Yankees aren’t the only team breaking out the bowling pins, and they’re hard to hide. Junior Caminero of the Rays, Adley Rutschman of the Orioles, and Davis Schneider of the Blue Jays have been using them, and the Red Sox sampled them in spring training. And they’ve broken containment in the AL East: Other teams have tried them, too, including the Cubs and Twins. Orioles hitting coach Cody Asche, a former big leaguer, said, “I think that’s not something that’s unique to the Yankees. I think a lot of teams are doing that around the league. They may have some more players who have adopted it at a higher rate, but I think if you’re around clubhouses, all 30 teams, you would see a guy or two who’s adopting a bat that is fashioned maybe more specifically for their swing. I think that’s probably the next progression in hitting. Finding out where you hit the ball in the sweet spot and putting more mass there without changing too many things.”
These probably aren’t purely placebo bats (though confidence in one’s tools can’t hurt). The bowling pins won’t benefit everyone—Judge essentially said that he doesn’t need them, a completely fair flex—and they definitely don’t guarantee nine homers a game. But for those whose swings they suit, they may marginally but measurably increase contact and exit speeds. (“We’re trying to win on the margins,” Yankees manager Aaron Boone said.) They’re mostly a means of boosting the margin for error, with the cost being even worse mishits on balls off the end of the bat (most of which weren’t hit hard to begin with). “Cutters, sweepers, sliders, any pitch running away that you hit further down the bat, those are tougher to hit hard,” said Twins shortstop and stathead Carlos Correa,
One can understand why hitters might be in the market for fat bats. The league batting average and on-base percentage fell to .243 and .312, respectively, last season, which is roughly where they were before the designated hitter. Not before the universal designated hitter; before the American League added the DH in 1973. Strikeout rates are still close to all-time highs, and the leaguewide batting average on balls in play fell to a more-than-30-year low last year. That was after MLB’s crackdown on defensive positioning. And yes, that’s partly a product of hitters swinging for the fences instead of prioritizing contact, but they’ve done that, in part, because it’s so tough to make contact even if they try.
Pitchers have been standing the same distance from the plate since 1893. They throw a heck of a lot harder now, and they’re so much taller that they release their pitches closer to the plate, which makes them seem even faster. Every year, they develop a new nasty pitch or at least rebrand an existing nasty pitch with a trendy new name that makes it catch on: the sweeper, the death ball, the kick-change. Every technological advance has favored pitchers first: Pitch tracking before batted-ball or bat tracking. High-speed cameras to help pitchers refine their grips. Analysis of when to pull pitchers, which pitches to throw, and where to throw them. Batters can only hope to adjust to each new way of getting them out. Better pitching machines could close the gap, but pitchers have basically become machines, and teams roll out relievers on assembly lines. The only thing hitters have had over pitchers to date is that their elbow ligaments are less liable to snap.
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Even the ways one could cheat have historically favored the pitchers. Before it was banned, sticky stuff helped pitchers increase their spin. But bat corking probably doesn’t even help hitters. Neither do the doughnuts hitters use in the on-deck circle to make their bats feel lighter at the plate. As Milwaukee’s Christian Yelich said, “If it is a technological advancement on the hitting side, it would be cool because we’ve kind of been playing catch-up with the pitching side.” Clearly, no helping hand for hitters, from weighted bats to biomechanics equipment to Trajekt Arc machines, has reversed the pitcher-batter imbalance. It’s the hitters’ turn to get a shiny new toy.
It’s also about time baseball bats got a makeover. In the 19th century, there were bigger bats and curved bats and flat bats, but the shape of bats has barely changed in baseball’s modern era. (“We’re just swinging the same broomstick we’ve swung for the last 100 years,” the Twins’ Ryan Jeffers told Passan.) But bats are stronger now, so they don’t shatter as easily. And Statcast now tracks both the bat and the position of the batter’s body in the box, which makes it possible to precisely tailor bats to an individual’s swing. When the exact way in which a hitter’s bat missed barreling the ball—in, out, high, low, early, late—can be quantified better than before, it’s easier to address those deficiencies.
For a few years now, companies have been measuring minute differences in bat density and size to eke out extra swing and exit speed, and hitters have been using bats with axe handles or hockey-puck-shaped knobs. Cultivating mass—or at least redistributing it—is just the next evolution. And it might be one that pitchers can’t copy. After all, they can’t legally doctor the ball. But hitters can legally alter the bat, to an extent, so they might as well press one of their only advantages.
If additional data doesn’t support the purported “one weird trick” edge, or the bats somehow hurt hitters and they prove to be a Phiten-esque fad, fine. (This spring, the oft-injured Stanton cryptically blamed his elbow woes on “bat adjustments.”) For now, though, there’s reason to think that these bowling pins can prevent some strikes; the early adopters certainly seem convinced. Bill James once wrote, “An inch in the strike zone means far more than 10 yards in the outfield.” We’ll soon see how much a few ounces on a bat barrel means.
Over the past two decades, defenders gained an edge by shifting their positioning in the field. Just think of this as a shift in the positioning of the bat barrel. Unless and until the new bats are banned—which they shouldn’t be—I say swing away.
