Throughout Main League Baseball’s (MLB) opening season in 2025, the New York Yankees hit a team-record 9 dwelling runs in a single recreation. Six of these homers got here from gamers utilizing a novel bowling-pin-shaped bat often known as a torpedo bat.
The bat’s design was first conceived by Aaron Leanhardt, who holds a Ph.D. in physics from MIT. The thought for a revamped bat got here to him whereas working with the Yankee’s minor-league hitting division.
Not like conventional bats, the torpedo bat tapers at each the highest and the underside, forming a torpedo form that additionally appears to be like a bit like somebody swinging a slim, the wrong way up bowling pin when in use. The design elevated the bat’s “candy spot,” the world credited with transferring probably the most power from the swing into the ball whereas additionally decreasing the drive of vibrations conveyed to the participant’s arms. Judging by that opening-season recreation, it definitely appeared just like the torpedo bat stood to revolutionize gameplay, and inside days of the nine-homer recreation all 30 groups in MLB had positioned orders for them.
But a brand new first-ever examine says that – at the least based on physics – the bats do not actually make any distinction by way of hitting a ball farther.
The researchers concerned within the examine come from Washington State College (WSU), the College of Illinois, and Penn State College. To seek out out if the bat actually was higher than the usual that is just about been unchanged for 150 years, the workforce created two bats from maple wooden that mimic normal MLB bats in addition to two torpedo-style bats.
All of the bats had equivalent swing weights, that means that all of them really feel the identical weight when swung. For instance, a bat with extra weight close to its tip would ship extra momentum via the hitting zone though it could really feel heavier and tougher to swing rapidly, whereas one with extra weight close to the barrel would really feel lighter to swing and provides the hitter extra management. Subsequent, the researchers used gentle gates and cameras to watch the incoming and outgoing pace of baseballs fired on the bats utilizing an air cannon. You will get a greater concept of the setup due to this temporary WSU video.
Torpedo Bat Testing at WSU
The one distinction that emerged within the testing is that the candy spot for the torpedo bat was a couple of half-inch farther from the bat’s tip than the usual bat. Apart from that, the bats carried out almost identically by way of how a lot drive was transferred to the incoming balls.
“It was really fairly phenomenal how shut they had been,” stated examine co-author Lloyd Smith, the Sport Science Laboratory director at WSU.
That stated, Smith additionally admits that the torpedo bat’s form and corresponding swing weight could possibly be making the bat really feel simpler to swing, which might in flip enhance batting common somewhat than appearing as an influence software blasting dwelling runs out of the park.
The workforce will current its study later this 12 months on the International Sports Engineering Association convention.
Supply: Washington State University
