In its brief moment of fame, the torpedo bat has made quite the impression in MLB. Over the weekend, the New York Yankees used the bat, designed by an MIT-educated professor, as an instrument of destruction against the hapless Milwaukee Brewers. Since then, I’ve heard about the bats so often that they’ve been showing up in my dreams. And that makes sense, because prior to this weekend, even in a bandbox like Yankee Stadium, even for a franchise that’s featured the likes of Babe Ruth, Lou Gheirig and Mickey Mantle, such home run power could only have been cooked up in the sweetest slumbers of their fanbase. Such a display of muscle was less video game and more cartoon, as in the famed 1946 Bugs Bunny clip that saw the Gas-House Gorillas rack up 46 straight runs against the genteel Tea Totallers.
In case you missed it, the Yankees, minus the 68 home runs of the now departed Juan Soto and the injured Giancarlo Stanton, provided a franchise record nine home runs in one game, 15 home runs across three games and 36 total runs against the Brewers. We’re talking about a Yankees team that coughed up five errors on Saturday and still won by 11 runs.
Torpedo bats are everywhere! https://t.co/Zdrqj0Oxl4
— David Lengel (@LengelDavid) March 31, 2025
The torpedo bats, just about the only thing that could overshadow MLB’s botching of Opening Day thanks to the crashing of its own app, is another example of how over-innovation can ruin baseball. The engineers who came up with the bat are cousins of the stats savants who brought us the analytics which slowly sucked the entertainment out of the sport, and the physics experts who came up with scientifically altered pitchers which sank the 2024 batting averages of all but six teams to below .250.
The latest over-innovation moves the bulk of the wood in the bat to the customized area where the batter is most likely to hit the ball the hardest. The enlarged sweetspot, which gives a player a better chance of making good contact makes perfect sense, and frankly, it’s incredibly smart. And yes, hitters do need something, anything, to take back some of the game from the pitchers who have shrank batting averages for years. Now they have.
Related: Yankees’ new torpedo bats draw attention after home-run blitz against Brewers
That said, 15 home runs in three games? That’s a problem. After the Yankees’ 12-3 win over the Brewers on Sunday, their radio voice Suzyn Waldman was trying to explain away the torpedo issue, by saying that it’s not new, that the exit velocity is similar between traditional and torpedo bats, that other teams use them and that the issue will be a talking point for a while until everyone moves on.
That’s partially true: other players around the league are toying with the bats, and it’s not ...
