New York Yankees' Jazz Chisholm Jr. prepares to bat during the first inning of a baseball game against the Milwaukee Brewers, on March 30, in New York.Pamela Smith/The Associated Press
At least half of every success story is marketing. This is why no one in pro football wants to wear a Guardian Cap.
They will prevent your brain from gradually becoming a chunky salsa, but it doesn’t sound good, does it? What man who benches 400 pounds thinks he needs ‘guarding’? However, if you put a small, steel horn on top of it and called it a spearing cap, it’d be ubiquitous.
This is the true genius of baseball’s newest thing, the torpedo bat.
The torpedo bat is a regulation Major League Baseball bat, but shaped in such a way that it thickens near the tip.
The idea is that if you manage to put the bat on a pitch exactly as you should, there will be more wood driving the ball. As every slugger knows, f = ma (force equals mass times acceleration).
The torpedo bat is the brainchild of analyst Aaron Leanhardt, a former professor of physics who made a midcareer turn into pro baseball. Until recently, he worked for the New York Yankees.
The Yankees have been testing the bats for a couple of years. The difference in shape is relatively subtle, so no one wrote about it.
Leanhardt took the bats to MLB officials for a going over. They agreed that they conform to the league’s standard for size and weight. Each bat is custom designed to emphasize the sweet spot of whoever is using it.
Several Yankees debuted a torpedo bat this season, and the team began on an unholy offensive tear. In their first three games, New York’s lineup hit 15 home runs. At that rate, the team would hit more than 800 this year. The all-time record is 307.
This is something, but it’s hard to say what. Anything can happen over the course of three games. Call back after 50 games. Or, better yet, 162.
Four of those 15 Yankee homers were hit by reigning American League MVP Aaron Judge. He doesn’t use a torpedo bat. When asked why, Judge said, “What I did the last couple of seasons speaks for itself.”
Judge is arguably the best hitter in baseball (the only counter-argument is Shohei Ohtani). If someone this good has had privileged access to a new technology and has decided it isn’t for him, how much of a disruptor can it be? At this point, the torpedo bat remains in the marketing phase.
On that level, it is – ahem – a home run. First off, the name is amazing. It doesn’t make much sense, but it’s great.
Torpedos don’t widen at the top. They thin. If you’re going to say it’s an upside-down torpedo, why would you point a torpedo at yourself?
The bats look more like maracas, or World War One stick grenades. If the Yankees had called the bats ‘hand grenades,’ something tells me roster uptake would have been more limited.
If the Yankees had spent their opening series hitting a bunch of hard line drives that fell for base hits instead of home runs, again, few people would be talking about this. Home runs make baseball people wild.
Anthony Volpe is one of the torpedo-bat poster boys. He hit two home runs in those three games, but they were his only hits.
Given multiple chances to credit the bats for whatever’s happening, the closest Volpe would get was suggesting that the new bats work because they look cool.
“A lot of it is just looking out at your bat, and you see how big the barrel is,” Volpe told reporters. “It’s exciting.”
I get this same excited feeling when I buy a new kind of notebook. I’m a sucker for any paper product with a slick Instagram ad, especially if it’s Japanese. I couldn’t tell you why.
I am constantly buying new notebooks, all of them shockingly expensive, all of which I am convinced will not only help me write better, but write more. I use them for a day, maximum, and then I go back to the cheap, ring-bound flip pads I’ve been using since high school. This will not stop me from trying again.
My prediction: that the torpedo bat is to baseball what the ideal notebook is to writing – a tool that makes the user feel more like whatever it is they aspire to be.
That’s not nothing. If someone who is already good enough to be a pro ballplayer feels even a little better about himself, that may produce tangible results. Several players who aren’t Yankees are already using them.
But are they going to change the game? No.
If hitters could put the barrel of the bat on the ball with regularity, they wouldn’t need a different kind of bat. They’d already be Aaron Judge.
If a pitcher sees a torpedo bat coming up to the plate, now he’ll be thinking one thing – crowd him. Having a bat that’s fat at the far end won’t do you much good if the ball never gets out across the plate. If you’re the sort of hitter who can hit an inside pitch, then why do you have a torpedo bat? You should have whatever the opposite of your upside-down torpedo is.
A prediction – a great many torpedo bats will be ordered. Everyone in Major League Baseball will try them at least once. A few will use them steadily. Those few will be over observed. If they hit well, the bat gets the credit. If they hit poorly, everyone will blame the man. Either way, they lose.
In short order, only a few true believers will want to be seen using this miraculous invention. Most players will stay with the boring wooden stick that got them this far. Same as Babe Ruth, Roger Maris and Barry Bonds.
The torpedo bat is a great story, but it has all the hallmarks of a fad. Fad products are only game-changing for one group of people – the ones selling them.