The “torpedo bat” is the hottest topic in the early stages of the 2025 Major League Baseball season. The torpedo bat, which first made headlines with the New York Yankees, is quickly spreading throughout the major leagues, with an increasing number of players eager to try it out.
The torpedo bat shifts weight closer down the bat, making the barrel appear slightly fatter and the bat narrower near the top. Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT physicist, came up with the design while working as a minor league hitting coordinator for the Yankees.
“I think the eureka moment, really, was when players pointed to where they were trying to hit the ball, and they noticed themselves that that was not the fattest part of the bat,” Leanhardt told MLB.com during a recent interview. “They noticed that the tip was the fattest part of the bat, and then everyone looked at each other and said, ‘Well, let’s flip it around. “It’ll look silly, but are we willing to go with it?”
The Yankees hit 22 home runs in their first six games of the 2025 season, including a nine-homer thrashing of the Milwaukee Brewers on March 29, setting a new major league mark.
But how can something as simple as the shape of the bat result in such significant offensive improvement? The Pitt News posed this exact question to the University of Pittsburgh’s physics department.
“The unfortunate thing is that the only honest answer anyone can give is that it’s complicated,” says Andrew Zentner, Pitt’s physics department chairman. Zentner, who is in his 18th year at Pitt, proposed possible explanations for how the shape of the bat might affect the velocity of the baseball.
According to Zentner, the harder the bat rotates when it collides with the ball, the more energy it transfers to the ball. A regular bat’s weight is evenly distributed on the far end, which makes the bat harder to swing.
The weight of the newly designed torpedo bats is distributed closer to the bat handle, closer to the batter’s hands.
“When you move some of the weight towards the sweet spots right here, then what happens is the weight of the bat becomes easier to swing because you’ve moved some of the weight closer to your hands,” Zentner told me.
The “sweet spot” he’s referring to is the area on the bat where the vibrations from hitting a baseball are the least.
“It’s not obvious, but bats are actually very flexible,” he said. “So if you hit it close to that spot, you’re transmitting as much energy as you possibly could to the ball, and as little energy as possible is being absorbed by the vibrations in the back.”
Torpedo bats may be effective for a variety of reasons, including faster swings. Another theory proposed by Zentner is that the sweet spot becomes slightly larger as the mass shifts in the redesigned torpedo bat. A larger sweet spot that extends towards the batter’s hands transfers more of the swing’s energy to the ball.
“In Anthony Volpe’s case, this is one of the things that is going on. “He’s a little behind the ball, and he hits it a little closer to the handle, so extending the sweet spot slightly closer to the handle might help,” Zentner said.
Zentner leans toward his second theory as to why torpedo bats may benefit hitters, but he acknowledges that there is no concrete evidence that the bats have any effect at all. “Unless this physicist who convinced the Yankees to use it knows in some secret place he hasn’t published, nobody knows for certain why they work,” according to Zentner.
Not all Yankees players use the torpedo bat. Star outfielder Aaron Judge, the reigning AL MVP who is off to a record-breaking start, chose to stick with his traditional bat, which has already produced six home runs this season.
But for players who have tried the new bat, such as New York infielders Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Anthony Volpe, the results speak for themselves. Chisholm has already hit five home runs this season, while Volpe has four.
Elly De La Cruz of Cincinnati also had a monster night with the torpedo bat, hitting two home runs and driving in a career-high seven runs in a 14-3 rout of Texas on March 31.
Several Pittsburgh Pirates players expressed an interest in trying out the bats. Utility player Jared Triolo and shortstop Isiah Kiner-Falefa told Noah Hiles of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that they are eager to test them out.
“I already have a few on the way,” Triolo explained.
“I’m hoping the staff will just bring some in here,” Kiner-Falefa explained. “I’m not sure until I try one, but I think it’s cool. I’ll take it into the game with one good swing. If it dramatically increases power, why not give it a try?”
Zentner is skeptical that the bats have a significant impact, but joked that as a Mets fan, it could simply be his bias against the Yankees.
“I’m sure that within a few years, there’s gonna be a physics paper where somebody goes through all the details of this and it’s published in physics journals and we know what the answer is, or at least we have a good guess,” according to Zentner.
“There is so much superstition surrounding baseball. So I believe that once people have found success with one bat type, they become obsessed with using that bat type. It may have a minor impact, but I believe that if the data strongly indicates that they are effective, people will undoubtedly migrate towards them,” Zentner stated.
Baseball is a sport based on sample sizes, and six games out of 162 are insufficient to draw firm conclusions. Nonetheless, the baseball world is buzzing about the possibility that the bats will spark a hitting revolution.
