KING OF PRUSSIA, Pa. (AP) — A 70-year-old man who plays in an area senior hardball league popped into Victus Sports this week because he needed bats for the new season. Plus he just had to take some cuts with baseball's latest fad and see for himself if there really was some wizardry in the wallop off a torpedo bat.
Ed Costantini, of Newtown Square, picked up the custom-designed VOLPE11-TPD Pro Reserve Maple, and took his hacks just like MLB stars and Victus customers Anthony Volpe or Bryson Stott would inside the company's batting cage and tracked the ball’s path on the virtual Citizens Bank Park on the computer screens.
Most big leaguers use that often indistinguishable “feel” as a qualifier as to how they select a bat.
Costantini had a similar process and thought the hype surrounding the torpedo since it exploded into the baseball consciousness over the weekend was a “hoax.” But after dozens of swings in the cage, where he said the balance was better, the ball sounded more crisp off the bat, the left-handed hitter ordered on the spot four custom-crafted torpedo bats at $150 a pop.
“The litmus test that I used was, I could see where the marks of the ball were,” Costantini said. “The swings were hitting the thickness of the torpedo as opposed to the end of the bat.”
More than just All-Stars want a crack at the torpedo — a striking design in which wood is moved lower down the barrel after the label and shapes the end a little like a bowling pin — and Costantini’s purchase highlighted the surge of interest in baseball’s shiny new toy outside the majors.
Think of home runs in baseball, and the fan’s mind races to the mammoth distances a ball can fly when slugged right on the nose, or a history-making chase that captivates a nation.
Of lesser interest, the ol’ reliable wood bat itself.
That was, of course, until Paul Goldschmidt and Cody Bellinger hit back-to-back homers for the New York Yankees last Saturday to open a nine-homer barrage. Victus Sports, known as much for their vibrant bats painted as pencils or the Phillie Phanatic dressed as a King’s Guard, had three employees at the game and they started a text thread where they hinted to those back home that, perhaps more than home runs were taking off.
Business was about to boom, too.
Torpedo bats are driving an unprecedented surge in lumber curiosityVictus spent most of the last 14 years trying to help shape the future of baseball. The company’s founders just never imagined that shape would resemble a bowling pin.
“It was the most talked about thing about bats that we ever experienced,” Victus co-founder Jared Smith said.
Victus isn't the only company producing the bulgy bats, but they were among the first to list them for sale online after the Yankees' made them the talk of the sports world. The torpedo bat took the league by storm in only 24 hours, and days later, the calls and orders, and test drives -- from big leaguers to rec leaguers -- are humming inside the company’s base, in a northwest suburb of Philadelphia.
“The amount of steam that it’s caught, this quickly, that’s certainly surprising,” Smith said. “If the Yankees hitting nine home runs in a game doesn’t happen, this doesn’t happen.”
Victus was stamped this season as the official bat of Major League Baseball and business was already good: Phillies slugger Bryce Harper is among the stars who stick their bats on highlight reels.
But that torpedo-looking hunk of lumber? It generated about as much interest last season in baseball as a .200 hitter. Victus made its first torpedoes around 2024 spring training when the ...
