Can Torpedo Bats Make It?

What is this strange bat that soared the New York Yankees to a record-breaking fifteen home runs in their first three games of the 2025 MLB season? The Yankees started out hot this season with a three-game sweep against the Milwaukee Brewers. Social media was going crazy everywhere about these strange new bats the Yankees have that helped them all be able to hit dingers as far as the eye can see. People were confused about what made this bat different, and they wanted to know how they could get on themselves. People thought they were newly designed and were new technology for baseball, but the Torpedo Bat has a rich history in baseball. 

            When we look back at the invention of the Torpedo bat, we find that its roots are tied to the Bottle Bat. The Bottle Bat is a wide-barreled bat with a heavy middle and a narrow handle. These bats are meant to maximize the “sweet spot” of the bat for a player to allow them to generate more power and get more hits on the ball overall. One of the first to use the Bottle Bat was Heinie Groh, who was a third baseman for the Giants, Reds, and Pirates from the years 1912 to 1927. He popularized the Bottle Bat in the early 1900s. He was known to have smaller hands and at this point, there were no bats with narrow spots for the player’s hands, so he made his own which ended up being known as the Bottle Bat. The bat had a seventeen-inch diameter and a thing long handle. Now although the bat worked very well for him it did not catch on with many of his teammates and opposing teams. The bat was deemed odd and just was not the same as a normal bat others were used to. Batters quickly adjusted and continued to use their traditional bats. 

            Now, the bat that the Yankees used is an upgraded version of this prior Bottle Bat. This bat was developed by Aaron Leonhardt, who was an MIT-educated physics professor at the University of Michigan for seven years. He started asking the Yankees’ hitters what they needed to perform better in the new age of baseball, which is run by fast pitching. Hitters wanted to counter the all-time high strikeouts by making more contact with the ball, and the easiest way to do so was to elongate the barrel, but doing so would slow down bat speed since the weight of the bat would increase. This led to the creation of the Torpedo bat. The bat redistributes the weight from the end of the bat to the middle area, around six to seven inches lower than the tip. This is the spot that most major league batters strike the ball at. Increasing the amount of wood in that spot allows their contact on the ball to increase since they are covering more area with the bat. This is the first time since Groh that the bats are making grounds again.

            Currently, the bats are taking a rise in popularity since the Yankees’ success since players implemented the bats into their game. Other players are beginning to follow even Old Dominion University brought in Torpedo Bats into their lineup. While the bats are on the rise right now, they could fall just like the bottle bats and Groh, but with these adaptations of the Torpedo bats, they are better than ever before and can even be customized for each player’s particular batting style. These bats have a chance to eventually be the norm if batting performance ends up staying as hot as they are now.