Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. I wonder if I could have made the majors with a torpedo bat.
In today’s SI:AM:
🐔 South Carolina keeps its streak
🐅 Auburn survives a scare
💼 NFL owner meetings
Baseball’s next big innovation?
Even with Juan Soto playing across the East River, the New York Yankees’ offense looked more than fine in the team’s season-opening series against the Milwaukee Brewers. The Yankees won all three games and scored a whopping 32 combined runs in Saturday and Sunday’s games, hammering a combined 13 home runs in the process.
But the Yankees’ prolific offense isn’t why they’re the biggest topic of conversation in baseball right now. It’s their bats—in a literal sense.
On Saturday, the YES Network broadcast highlighted several New York hitters coming to the plate swinging bats unlike anything fans had become accustomed to in the previous century of baseball. While the barrel of the bat traditionally maintains a consistent width all the way to the end, these new “torpedo bats” are tapered toward the end, essentially shifting the barrel of the bat closer to the hitter’s hands.
The idea behind the design is simple. If a player is prone to making contact with the ball closer to their hands and missing the sweet spot, the torpedo bat shifts the sweet spot toward the handle. It’s an easy concept to understand, but it required years of development from some very smart people. The man being credited as the inventor of the torpedo bat is Aaron Leanhardt, who has a Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was a physics professor at the University of Michigan from 2007 to ’14. Leanhardt began working for the Yankees as an analyst in ’18 and left this offseason to take a field coordinator position with the Miami Marlins, but the Yankees are still using the concepts he helped develop.
“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,” Leanhardt explained in an interview with Brendan Kuty of The Athletic.
Yes, the Yankees have a literal genius MIT Physicist, Lenny (who is the man), on payroll. He invented the “Torpedo” barrel. It brings more wood - and mass - to where you most often make contact as a hitter. The idea is to increase the number of “barrels” and decrease misses. pic.twitter.com/CsC1wkAM9G
— Kevin Smith (@KJS_4) March 29, 2025
The bats are weird, but they’re totally legal. MLB said Sunday that the bats fall within Rule 3.02, which requires that bats be no longer than 42 inches, no wider than 2.61 inches in diameter and made of one solid piece of wood. The rule also requires that “experimental” bats be approved by the league before they are used in a game.
There were five Yankees hitters who used the new bats over the weekend: Austin Wells, Cody Bellinger, Paul Goldschmidt, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Anthony Volpe. Those five have combined to hit nine home runs over the first three games of the season.
“The benefit for me is, I like the weight distribution,” Bellinger said. “Personally, the weight is closer to my hands, so I feel as if it’s lighter in a way. For me, that was the biggest benefit. Obviously, the bigger the sweet spot, the bigger the margin for error.”
One reason the bats seem to be such a big story is that the Yankees used them to completely bludgeon the Brewers over the weekend. New York won 20–9 on Saturday while hitting a franchise-record nine home runs and followed that up with a 12–3 win on Sunday. After Saturday’s blowout, Brewers pitcher Trevor Megill was highly critical of the bats.
“I think it's terrible. We’ll see what the data says. I’ve never seen anything like it before,” Megill said. “I feel like it’s something used in slow-pitch softball. It’s genius: Put the mass all in one spot. It might be bush [league]. It might not be. But it’s the Yankees, so they’ll let it slide.”
But the bats aren’t new, and the Yankees aren’t the only ones using them. Bellinger said he tried using one last season when he was with the Chicago Cubs but only used it in batting practice. At least one Yankees hitter appears to have used the torpedo bat in games last season, though. Outfielder Jasson Domínguez said Giancarlo Stanton had been using the bat, which is noteworthy because Stanton is currently on the injured list with injuries to both elbows that he previously attributed to “bat adjustments.”
Several other big leaguers used the bats over the weekend, including New York Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, Minnesota Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers, Tampa Bay Rays infielder Junior Caminero and Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Davis Schneider. But those players haven’t been as successful with the new style of bat as the Yankees’ hitters were. Lindor and Schneider have yet to pick up a hit this season, while Jeffers is 1-for-8.
So the torpedo bat isn’t an automatic cheat code for a home run like the Yankees have made it seem, but it could be the tweak some hitters need to improve their performance at the plate. Volpe, for example, struggled to make contact on the barrel of the bat last season, ranking in the 12th percentile in barrel rate, and as a result had a lackluster .657 OPS. If the theory behind the torpedo bat is sound, it’s easy to envision how it could boost Volpe’s stats.
The thing that makes the torpedo bat interesting, though, is how it shows that teams are willing to explore every little detail of the game to find an advantage. When you think about the analytics revolution in baseball, the most obvious examples are changes in strategy, statistical evaluation and player development. But the Yankees’ embrace of this equipment change is a reminder that even the most basic elements of the game can be tweaked for incremental advantages.
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- Auburn’s trip to the men’s Final Four came with the added drama of seeing star forward Johni Broome leave with an injury. Pat Forde has more on how the Tigers managed to hold their own against Michigan State until Broome was able to return.
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This article was originally published on www.si.com as SI:AM | Yankees’ ‘Torpedo’ Bats Are All the Rage After Deluge of Homers.
