Torpedoes Away!! The Yankees fire on all cylinders!!
The MLB season began with a barrage from a strange-shaped bat and it’s all because of an MIT boffin
Baseball began. The first series of the season were sensational. How to parse all this drama, all these super-sized characters, the many prime-time storylines and create one yarn for you, a baseball beginner?
I’ve got two words for ya’.
TORPEDO. BATS.
The New York Yankees obliterated the Milwaukee Brewers across their three-game series in the Bronx, setting all kinds of records and generally making a lot of noise – specifically, the noise of a baseball being absolutely destroyed.
They hit 15 home runs over three remorseless beatings of the Brewers. But it was Saturday’s 20-9 win that kicked off a story that is still running wild through MLB.
It started with Nestor Cortes on the mound for the Brewers. Cortes had been signed after leaving the Yankees in the off season and his old pals hit home runs off of his first three pitches. That’s incredible – a first in baseball history.
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One of the reasons it had never happened before is that after the first two pitches are smacked into the cheap seats, a pitcher almost always throws one out of the strike zone, for a ‘ball’ (as opposed to a ‘strike’). The reason? He doesn’t want to be the first pitcher in MLB history to have his first three pitches hit for home runs.
Not Nestor. Nestor Cortes is an interesting dude. He mixes up the timing of his pitches. He sometimes drops down his arm slot – the angle from which he throws. He’s basically a shithouser. I love him. So of course Nestor 4D-chess’d the hell out of this conundrum.
They just hit my first two pitches out of the park. The last thing they’d expect is a strike down the middle of the plate. I can get one past them for free.
Well, as the philosopher Mike Tyson once said, everybody has a plan until Aaron Judge absolutely melts the ball into the second deck at Yankee Stadium.
MLB history. Three pitches. Three home runs.
But that’s not the story.
The two players who preceded Judge in the hit parade – Paul Goldschmidt and Cody Bellinger – plus Jazz Chisholm, Anthony Volpe and Austin Wells, all hit homers using a relatively new kind of bat.
The Torpedo Bat, as it has become to be known, was actually in use last year. It was designed by Aaron Leanhardt, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and was an analyst with the Yankees from 2017 to 2023, when he designed a bat in response to a problem that was common amongst the star employees in the organisation.
The problem? Batters were making contact with the ball above the ‘barrel’ of the bat – the fattest part, toward the far end from the batter’s hands.
The solution? Keeping the bat within regulation size, move the mass up the bat, towards the hands, creating a ‘sweet spot’ where contact was commonly being made.
The result? So far, so good.
Not everyone uses the bat. Aaron Judge hit three homers in that walkover win over the Brewers and came very close to another, which would have made him the third player in the history of the sport to hit four home runs in a single MLB game. He hits more home runs than everyone else and generally wins the American League MVP award on an annual basis, so he’s not in a mad rush to change anything.
And a handful of players outwith the Yankees do use the bat. So far, without the same destructive success. And a closer look at the Brewers’ pitching staff that was overwhelmed by the Yankees bats reveals an injury-depleted bunch, including several MLB rookies.
There may be more significant factors at play, but the introduction of new tech has dominated the conversation in baseball for the first week of the new season.
Is the torpedo bat legal? Yes. Regulations limit the length of the bat and the width at its widest point.
Is it fair? As Trevor Plouffe, the former MLBer and co-host of my favourite baseball content, the podcast Talkin’ Baseball, argued, pitchers have benefited from generation after generation of technological advancement. They receive data breaking down every aspect of every pitch they throw, and those pitches are evaluated against the swing paths and habits of every batter they face. The least the humble batter is entitled to is a little extra lumber.
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It’s a certainty that more players will pick up the torpedo bat in the weeks ahead. That means a swell in the data set. And baseball adores a swollen data set.
I just thought it was fun to watch the Bronx Bombers live up to their name.