In his playing days, Eric Gagné’s objective was simple.
“My job was to break bats,” the former Dodgers closer, and 2003 Cy Young Award winner, joked with a laugh.
Which makes his current occupation, as the CEO of Quebec-based bat company B45, a little more than ironic.
“Now my job is to make sure the bats don’t break anymore, make sure the ball goes farther,” Gagné said in a phone interview this week. “That was my enemy back in the day.”
Where Gagné was once a hitter’s menace, collecting 161 of his 187 career saves with the Dodgers from 1999-2006, the retired 49-year-old right-hander is now one in the business of helping them hit.
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Ten years ago, he helped front an ownership group that bought B45, long among the more innovative manufacturers in the world of bat-making. And, a little more than a year ago, it put him on the cutting edge of the sport’s newest hitting creations.
Last spring, B45’s pro sales rep, Kevin Young, was making an annual tour of Major League Baseball’s spring training complexes to visit clients. During his stop at New York Yankees camp, Young was approached by team analyst Aaron Leanhardt, a former MIT-educated physics professor who had come up with a distinctly original idea.
“He was like, ‘Hey, do you guys do this?’ ” Young recalled.
In Leanhardt’s hand was an early prototype of the so-called torpedo bat.
Originally conceived of by Leanhardt while working in the Yankees’ front office, the bowling-pin-shaped torpedo model eschews the typical characteristics of traditional bat designs. The fattest part of the barrel is actually closer to the handle, with the idea of redistributing more mass to an area where some hitters make more frequent contact. The rest of the lumber is rounded into a more tapered shape at the end.
In the early days of this year’s season, torpedo bats have become all the rage for big-league hitters. They burst into the public consciousness after a torpedo-heavy Yankees lineup mashed 15 home runs in their season-opening series. And now, they are showing up in almost every big-league clubhouse.
“They had 100 different bat models [already], shaped this way, shaped that way,” said veteran Dodgers slugger Max Muncy, one of many MLB hitters who placed an order for his own torpedo bat this week. “But nothing’s ever been as drastic as what this ...
