On March 27th, 2025, the New York Yankees debuted their “torpedo” bats against the Milwaukee Brewers. The scores to these games were 4-2, 20-9, and 12-3. The Yankees won all, and they broke the record for most home runs in a series. So instantly, the world had questions: was there an actual advantage with these bats?
The concept of these bats emerged from the analytical mind of Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT-educated physicist and former minor league hitting coach for the Yankees. Leanhardt sought to address the increasing strikeout rates and declining batting averages by bat design. His goal was to optimize the bat’s mass distribution to align with the typical contact points of hitters, enhancing performance. This led to the creation of the torpedo bat, characterized by a barrel that is thickest near the handle, where hitters mostly make contact. Traditional baseball bats distribute weight evenly along the barrel, but this uniform distribution doesn’t account for the fact that hitters often make contact closer to the handle. The torpedo bat addresses this by shifting more wood to the area near the hands.
Former MLB player Scott Taylor says the bats give the batter a competitive advantage.
“The thing is that your hands would literally never get jammed, every sinker or cutter would no longer matter,” Taylor said. “Your bat would never break. You would see a lot more hits down the line. Third basemen would have a way less fun time at their position.”
The reason they even made these bats was because of Yankee’s player Anthony Volpe. Volpe was struggling very badly during the 2024 season. He was constantly getting jammed and not making hard contact. He was in the bottom 50 in hard hit percentage last year, with only nine home runs. He already had three through two games this season. There was an obvious increase in launch angle and exit velocity. He is still getting thrown very similar pitches, but he is hitting the ball so much harder.
Although these bats are popular. Not everyone is using them, Aaron Judge is one. He said: “I hit just as fine as I did last year. I feel like if I switch it up, I’m just gonna be in a situation where I swap back and forth. And if I struggle, I’m gonna get worse and worse.” Judge has won two MVP awards in the last three years — hitting 55+ home runs each of those MVP seasons.
Other teams have been struggling with how to pitch to these hitters. Even pitchers are starting to voice concerns. One National League pitching coach said: “We’re gonna have to rethink how we pitch to these guys. They’re not getting jammed anymore. Everything’s going the other way or out of the park.”
These bats have definitely updated the MLB’s opening day ratings, with everyone curious about how they look and how effective they are. So the MLB is not going to get rid of these bats as they create more viewership for the sport, even though they may grant a competitive advantage. If anything, these may help the game of baseball’s viewership, because offense is fun. And the MLB has already made rule changes to make pitching harder and to make hitting and offense in general easier.
The bats will not be “game-breaking,” but they are definitely going to cause attraction to the sport. Considering some people call the sport boring and slow, this should please viewers who weren’t so interested before. I think it is great that baseball is such a calming sport to watch and therapeutic in a way. And maybe with these bats and other rule changes, some records could get broken, for example Barry Bonds’ home run record, or Pete Rose’s most hits of all time.
MLB has made the game better. Maybe if high school players wanted to get in on the action, they would make metal Torpedo Bats. You would see some serious power from those. Torpedo bats will be here to stay so get used to them. You might just be calling them bats in the future.
