Enough About the Torpedo Bats Already

Ay! I'm battin' here!

You guys remember the drone craze from late last year? When we had elected U.S. Senators — like Andy Kim of New Jersey, for instance — going out and recording these Cloverfield-ass videos pointed up at flashing lights in the sky which later turned out to be… passenger planes leaving Newark?

Had you forgotten about that until I just reminded you? Yes? Well, consider yourself lucky. You have a short memory for social panics, and for that, you should be grateful.

But you’re less lucky if you’re a baseball fan, because we’re right back at it with these damn “torpedo bats” a couple of Yankees used over opening weekend.

And this one might even edge into the moral panic zone, if you were to ask known baseball scholar Dave Portnoy, who claimed — seriously — that the bats were “infiltrating” the “sacred” game of baseball. Drama!

So this is already getting out of hand, because this is just something we do sometimes. We are all alerted to something that already existed last year, and we get this weird, presumably algorithm-driven groupthink cycle going where we start to over-interpret what’s actually in front of us.

For those unaware, the torpedo bats are a new style of baseball bat with the so-called ‘sweet spot’ on the bat — where a hitter aims to ‘barrel’ a baseball, thus producing the best/hardest contact — moved down lower than you’d see on the usual silhouette of an old-school baseball bat. It’s more in the middle. Nifty!

It’s subtle, but you can kind of see it in the picture above. Usually, once the cylinder starts to widen, right around the brand label you see there, it never stops. It stays that same width. In this design, it tapers back at the end, which invokes some higher power of physics that I can’t explain to you. Sorry. Sorry! Humanities guy. You know this. Remember this.

And look, the headline aside — it’s provocative! It gets the people going! — there does appear to be something to this technology. And I certainly can’t claim to be some expert in bat geometry over and above the literal physicist who designed this, nor the guys who are actually swinging these things in the batter’s box.

I am no Yankees fan, but, two things. One, these bats are not limited to the Yankees. Far from it. Players on the Reds, Cubs, Phillies, Orioles, Pirates, Twins, Blue Jays, Mets, and Portnoy’s very own Red Sox all used a version of this bat over the weekend, and to varying degrees of success. Some rocked! Others did not. Because it’s really hard to hit a baseball, and believe it or not, even a different bat design probably cannot take a good hitter and make him great any more than it can take a bad hitter and make him good.

In the game everyone freaked out about, when the Yankees jumped all over their old pal Nestor Cortes on the way to a 20-9 win, it was Aaron Judge who got the hat trick. He hit three homers that day, all using his old bat. Yes, Cody Bellinger — who started using one of these bats last year — and my old pal Paul Goldschmidt did hit their dingers with the help of this new superweapon, but the best player on the Yankees remains the guy who’s sticking with the usual lumber.

Slap-hitting infielders like Jazz Chisholm, Jr. and Anthony Volpe have also used these bats to get off to uncharacteristically good power starts, and those are admittedly more notable to my mind. We don’t know them as long-ball guys, whereas Bellinger came close to 50 bombs in his MVP year and Goldschmidt is a future Hall-of-Famer with 363 and counting to his name. We cannot claim to be shocked that those guys are hitting the baseball.

I do not expect either Chisholm or Volpe to finish in the top ten in homers this year. I’m not sure I expect either Bellinger or Goldschmidt to either, but they’d have a better chance. As would Giancarlo Stanton, who used these bats to great effect last postseason.

The overall case I would make here is that maybe the Yankees are just locked in to start the year, and you can hit a lot of homers in Yankee Stadium? I’m prepared to be wrong about that, but I can say this confidently: torpedo bats are not “ruining” baseball. They can’t.

And even if they were some catastrophic scourge in the way that guys like Portnoy are describing, is more exciting offense not what fans have been clamoring for the last few years? Is the problem here just that it seems to be the Yankees who’ve (maybe) gotten the biggest boost from this new innovation?

Because it isn’t going to stay that way. Not if they are, in fact, effective; which they probably will be for some players, and probably won’t be for others.

The current HR leader, Eugenio Suarez, who’s only one ahead of Judge, is not yet a torpedo launcher. Nor is the next guy, Kyle Tucker, or the next guy, Mookie Betts, or most of the rest of the top 15. Some names you’d expect to see there at the end of the year, like Kyle Schwarber, and those you assuredly would not, like another one of my old pals, Tommy Edman. (Sigh.)

These bats will make a difference. But we are way, way ahead of ourselves in trying to say what kind of difference that will be, and IMHO, there’s certainly nothing unfair going on here. These are legal, they’re available to everyone, and we’ll see pretty soon whether they have a broader impact on the league.

The one nice thing I will say about this whole thing is that it’s nice to see the hitters on the front foot of innovation for once. For years, we’ve been hearing about pitchers hacking spin rate and velocity and deploying entirely new pitches.

They have made all kinds of tech-driven strides of late, and the decline in overall offense has underlined what’s become an imbalance in power. Last year, the league-wide batting average was .243. While that is no perfect stat, it is nonetheless notable that that is among the ten worst offensive seasons in history, which is quite a lot of history, as these records date back to 1871.

And you’ll never guess what is currently the worst season ever by that same metric. That’d be this year, good ol’ 2025, where even the Bronx Bombers can’t juice the league average. That, of course, is a doubly meaningless stat this many games in, but my point is: you’re right, it is meaningless that the Yankees had a good series to start the year and a few of their guys are using these big bopper bats to do it.

I’m glad people are talking about baseball, so let’s not leave that unsaid. But this is silly, guys.

Time will tell, of course. I could be downplaying this. We’re still in such small-sample-size territory that there’s nothing to glean here quite yet. For now, though, there just isn’t much evidence that there’s any sacrilegious infiltration going on here. Sorry Dave.

And to whatever limited extent that is happening, I’m not sure I have a problem with it. Quite the opposite. Just be sure to send some to the Cardinals, would you?

🏈 I continue to think the Ban the Tush Push stuff is also dumb, and more than a little sour grapes. What always seems to go unsaid about this play is the fact that the push isn’t, so far as I can tell, what makes the Eagles so good at it. It’s the coordination, strength, and body level of their O-line. Maybe Mailata taught them a thing or two about scrummaging? Anyways. The Eagles will still be able to punish you with 4th and 1 sneaks because they have the personnel for it.

🏀 Investigating finger-gun gestures doesn’t necessarily feel like a great use of the NBA’s time, but man. What in the hell happened to the bright-future Ja Morant Grizzlies? Just seems like something’s broken down Memphis way. I miss that guy, pre-IG Live. (Good shot last night tho.)

🏆 I 110% agree with this take from JJ Redick on the Most Improved Player award: “I hate that award… Just call it the high draft pick that is on a max contract and now is an All-Star.” The last five winners — Tyrese Maxey, Lauri Markannen, Ja Morant, Julius Randle, and Brandon Ingram — do suggest something like that, but what he’s really getting at is whether Cade Cunningham should be getting this over someone like Austin Reaves or Dyson Daniels. He’s in the bag for Reaves, obviously, but I take his point, and I think I agree. I think I’d typically prefer that this go to someone who came out of the woodwork rather than the lottery, or at least someone who scuffled along a little longer than Cade did. But then again, this is all maddeningly subjective and doesn’t make a ton of sense no matter how you choose to look at it.

⚾ The Dodgers have to lose eventually, right? Right??? As the nightmare start gets worse for the Braves.

🎓 And finally — I might do this in a longer format next week — is it a problem that we only have 1-seeds in the Final Four? I’m gonna go with no. While I’m sympathetic to the fear that Cinderella teams are dead, I don’t think they are, and I’m going to need a few more years’ worth of evidence until I believe that. Furthermore, there’s something confusing to me about the fact that that argument — the why can’t it just be like it used to be argument — is essentially that a guy like Walter Clayton, Jr., who has been an absolute megawatt star for Florida this year, should’ve been required to stay at an obviously lesser program in Iona rather than prove he was capable of being this good at this level? Why? I don’t get it. Again, I return to the coaches. We don’t ask Will Wade, until very recently the head coach at McNeese State, to stay there forever and, I don’t know, “face adversity.” We tell him to make the most of his opportunities and pursue better ones when they arise, and we don’t get mad when they do that, because if we were in their position, we’d want to be able to do the same. On some level, I get it. Neutral fans might have preferred to see Sion James spearhead an upset for Tulane — where he played a full four years, by the way — rather than join the Duke Death Star. But Sion James, who probably has ambitions to go full-on pro after this, deserved A.) the opportunity to cash in at least once in a meaningful way in college, and B.) put more of his tape against a higher level of competition in front of more scouts. And I’m supposed to be upset by this? Please.