Despite losing their first game of the MLB season, the New York Yankees continued their historic start to the year as they broke multiple records through their prolific home run hitting.
In the Yankees’ 7-5 home loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the team went deep three times – one each for Jasson Domínguez, Anthony Volpe and Ben Rice – to reach 18 through the first four games of the 2025 season.
The mark broke the MLB record for the most homers a team has hit through the opening four games of a season, breaking the previous record of 16 set by the 2006 Detroit Tigers.
According to the Yankees’ website, which cites Stats Perform, the team also became the first in MLB history to have nine players hit home runs in the team’s first four games and the first to have three players hit at least three in the opening four games: Volpe, Aaron Judge and Jazz Chisholm Jr.
In that span, the Yankees have scored 41 runs which is second-most in franchise history through four games, trailing only their 48 runs racked up in 1950.
Despite the record-breaking evening, it wasn’t enough for the Bronx Bombers on the night.
“It’s a long season, so it’s alright, but it’s definitely disappointing,” Yankees pitcher Mark Leiter Jr. said afterwards, per the Yankees website. “We had a chance to win that game, and I’ve got to make better pitches right there.”
‘Somebody should have invented this decades ago’
The Yankees have been one of the main beneficiaries of the “torpedo” bats which have sparked so much conversation through the opening of the new season.
“Torpedo” bats, so called because their shape resembles a torpedo, were developed by former MIT physicist and current Miami Marlins staffer Aaron “Lenny” Leanhardt when he was an analyst in the Yankees organization. The thinking, he told the Athletic, is to make the bat “as heavy and as fat as possible” in the spot where players are most often making contact with the ball.
The Yankees analytics department looked at every player’s hitting data so that the widest part of the bat – or the barrel – could be placed where they most often hit the ball and adjusted each player’s individual bat accordingly.
Only a handful of Yankees players are currently using the “torpedo” bats, with Volpe and Chisholm Jr. enjoying red-hot starts as a result, while Judge is also off to a great start with his standard bat.
The success of the “torpedo” has been the biggest talking point of the early 2025
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