The biggest revelation from Major League Baseball’s opening weekend was not the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 5-0 dominance, the four home runs hit already by Eugenio Suárez or Miami’s three consecutive walk-off wins.
Instead, the talk of baseball has been new, torpedo-shaped bats used by several members of the New York Yankees — and the league-leading offensive numbers they have produced.
The Yankees have scored 36 runs, an MLB-high 22 more than their opponents, through three games, including a team-record nine home runs in Saturday’s victory over Milwaukee.
Of the five home runs allowed that day by Brewers starter Nestor Cortes, a former Yankee, four were hit by players using bats that eschew the thick-barreled shape used for generations and instead shift wood from the end of the bat closer to the middle, near its label.
Awareness of the bats became a trending topic during Saturday’s home run derby after Yankees broadcaster Michael Kay revealed the change was a result of a study by the team’s analytics department of shortstop Anthony Volpe that found “every single ball it seemed like he hit on the label. He didn’t hit any on the barrel.”
“So they had bats made up where they moved a lot of the wood into the label so the harder part of the bat is going to actually strike the ball.”
“I know I’m bought in,” Volpe told The Associated Press. “The bigger you can have the barrel where you hit the ball, it makes sense to me.”
The new bats are used by Volpe, Jazz Chisholm — who hit two home runs Sunday — Paul Goldschmidt, Cody Bellinger and Austin Wells. They have tallied nine homers in the team’s first three games.
Yankees manager Aaron Boone said it was an example of the team “trying to win on the margins.”
MLB has only seven stipulations governing bats in its official rule book, and the new shape does not appear to violate them. Rules require bats to be one piece of solid wood, a “smooth, round stick not more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length.” Experimental bats are not allowed “until the manufacturer has secured approval from Major League Baseball of his design and methods of manufacture.”
“It’s all within regulation,” Bellinger, who has said he used similar bats during practice but not games last year with the Chicago Cubs, told the AP. “They made sure [of] that before the season even started, knowing that, I imagine, at some point the way these bats look that it’s probably going to get out at some point.”
Where did the specific design come from?
In a series of posts on X, former Yankees infielder Kevin Smith credited Aaron Leanhardt, a former Yankees staffer now employed by the Miami Marlins, for the concept of shifting more wood and density to where hitters make contact most often. Leanhardt “would say ‘5-10 years from now this is all anyone will be using’” Smith posted.
Before he worked in baseball, Leanhardt was a physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Leanhardt told The Athletic on Sunday that the idea was sparked while he was working with the Yankees’ minor-league hitting department.
“It’s just about making the bat as heavy and as fat as possible in the area where you’re trying to do damage on the baseball,” Leanhardt told The Athletic.
By any measure, the Yankees have, indeed, done damage. They have hit for an MLB-high team average of .333 and added 11 home runs, one off the league lead. Not all of those gaudy statistics can be attributed to new bats, however.
Aaron Judge, last season’s home run champion, who has already hit four this season and batted in 11 runs, is among the Yankees who are non-torpedo-bat users.
“What I did the past couple seasons speaks for itself,” Judge said, per the New York Post. “Why try to change something if you have something that’s working?”
