There’s always some trend that takes over baseball and makes everyone lose their minds. The opener. Weird defensive shifts. The super utility man.

Baseball is a copycat sport. If one team finds success with something new, every team will jump on it. Same with players. (See, Steroid Era.)

The latest “it” thing is the torpedo bat. The Yankees hit nine home runs on opening day. They became the only team to ever hit seventeen home runs in its first four games. It’s an impressive display of power, with most of these home runs coming from players using the new torpedo bat. 

Suddenly, it’s a magic bat and every hitter must have it. The Rangers were shellacked 14-3 on Monday by the Reds, with Elly De La Cruz hitting two monster homers. He used the torpedo bat. So did Matt McLain, who homered in the first.

Rangers’ hitters rushed to place an order. Their new bats should be in for the Tampa Bay series starting today.

Funny thing happened, though. After scorching the Rangers Monday, those same torpedo-bat wielding Reds’ hitters went the next two entire games—eighteen innings—without hitting a home run. They didn’t even score a run.

Wait, were their torpedo bats suddenly broken? Did the Rangers dampen the enthusiasm?

Okay, what exactly is a torpedo bat? 

Major League Baseball has strict rule on the bat. Most bats have a narrow handle on one end where the batter holds it and a thick barrel on the other end to hit the ball with. The design has remained pretty much the same for over one hundred years. Different manufacturers or hitters try different things, like cupping the end to reduce a bit of weight or, in Sammy Sosa’s case, illegally hollowing out the middle and replacing it with cork so it’s so much lighter, thus easier to swing and generating more bat speed. But bat technology has roughly remained the same. A bat started out thin then got thicker at the end.

Then, a guy in the Yankees analytics department named Aaron Leanhardt, a former MIT physicist, had the idea to move the sweet spot of the bat, and to individualize each player’s bats to their particular sweet spot. He reasoned that the fat part of the bat should vary per player. So he moved it. It’s no longer at the top, it’s inches below. Thus, a torpedo shape.

It makes sense. If a guy usually makes contact five inches from the top of the bat, put the barrel there instead of at the top, otherwise he’s missing the most potent part of the bat. 

By shifting the barrel of impact, the torpedo bat removes weight while it shifts the impact point. As Bill Chappell of NPR.com explains: “Torpedo bats’ diameters widen, but then they narrow, bringing a number of dynamics into play. On an essential level, moving weight from the end of the bat closer to the hands reduces what’s called the swing weight or in technical language, the moment of inertia of the bat, making it easier to swing, easier to control.”

Not all batters are sold on it. Aaron Judge, the man who broke Roger Maris’s single-season legitimate, non-steroid-aided home run record in 2022, and who hit three home runs in the second game of the season this year, uses his regular bat.

On Wednesday night, Max Muncy of the Dodgers had been struggling to get a hit with his torpedo bat the previous three games. He discarded it on his final at-bat of the game, hit a game-tying two-run double in the eighth, and saw his team win it in the ninth.

Players who swear by the torpedo bat think it’s the greatest thing ever. Others argue it’s not the bat, it’s the mental aspect of thinking you have an advantage, which give you an advantage because so much of hitting is confidence and a mental approach.

But, as Nathan Eovaldi, Jack Leiter, and the Rangers bullpen proved Tuesday and Wednesday night in Cincinnati, the torpedo bat isn’t magic. 

Joc Pederson should be using his tonight. He, and the rest of the Rangers hitters, could use all the help they can get.

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