The New York Yankees bats blasted a team-record nine home runs on Saturday that went a total of 3,695 feet, garnering attention for the new torpedo bats.
Paul Goldschmidt, Cody Bellinger, Austin Wells, Anthony Volpe, and Jazz Chisholm Jr. all hit home runs in New York’s 20-9 thumping of the Milwaukee Brewers, using a radically different model in which wood is placed deeper down the barrel after the label and curves the end a bit like a bowling pin.
“That’s just trying to be the best we can be,” Aaron Boone, the manager, stated on Sunday. One of the things that has been brought to light is that. We’re trying to win on the margins, and that manifests itself in a variety of ways, as I constantly tell you guys.
“The bat shall be a smooth, round stick not more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length,” reads Rule 3.02 of Major League Baseball’s comparatively simple bat regulations. The bat will be made of a single, solid piece of wood. It continues by saying that experimental models need MLB approval and that there may be a cupped depression up to 1ΒΌ inches deep, 2 inches broad, and at least 1 inch in circumference.
Aaron Leanhardt, a former Yankees front-office employee who currently works for the Miami Marlins, created the torpedo barrel to add additional bulk to a bat’s sweet spot, according to a Saturday online post by former Yankees shortstop Kevin Smith.
Smith wrote, “You’re going up with a weapon that can be better.” Flares may [be] barrels, clips could be clips, and just misses could be clips. It was accurate to say that these results are varied by just a hair’s breadth.
Bellinger followed with a 451-foot shot that at first didn’t register on Statcast after Goldschmidt, hitting leadoff for the first time, began with a 413-foot homer off Nestor Cortes. According to the Elias Sports Bureau, Aaron Judge launched a 468-foot home run with a conventionally shaped bat, becoming the Yankees the first team to smash home runs on each of the first three pitches of a game.
The torpedo-shape idea was initially introduced to Bellinger at a Chicago Cubs hitting practice last season, but he did not use it in a game. This year, during spring training, he received a more sophisticated version.
“I started swinging this one in spring or before spring, kind of early on, and I was like, ‘Oh it feels good,'” Bellinger said. “It was an ounce lighter than the one I was swinging, but I think the way the weight was distributed felt really good.”
Bellinger, the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 2019 National League MVP, cited MLB’s 2010 rule change that reduced the allowable diameter from 2.75 inches as the reason for switching from a maple Louisville Slugger to a birch bat.
