Pitt’s physics department takes a swing at explaining MLB’s torpedo bat phenomenon

The hottest topic in the early going of the 2025 MLB season is the “torpedo bat.” First brought into headlines by the New York Yankees, the torpedo bat is quickly spreading through the major leagues, with an increasing number of players looking to try them out. 

The torpedo bat shifts weight closer down the bat, resulting in the barrel looking slightly fatter and the bat getting narrower near the top. The design was first created by Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT physicist who devised the idea while working in the Yankees organization as a minor league hitting coordinator. 

“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 said in an interview with MLB.com. “They noticed themselves that the tip was the fattest part of the bat, and then everyone just looked at each other like, ‘Well, let’s flip it around. It’s going to look silly, but are we willing to go with it?’”

The Yankees smashed 22 home runs in their first six games to open the 2025 season — including a nine home run blowout of the Milwaukee Brewers on March 29 — setting a new major league record. 

But how can something as simple as the shape of the bat result in so much offensive improvement? The Pitt News asked the physics department at the University of Pittsburgh this very question. 

“The unfortunate thing is that the only honest answer anyone can give is that it’s complicated,” Andrew Zentner, chairman of the physics department at Pitt, said. Zentner, who is in his 18th year at Pitt, offered potential explanations for how the shape of the bat could affect the velocity of the baseball. 

According to Zentner, the harder it is to rotate the bat when it collides with the ball, the more energy it will give to the ball. In a regular bat, weight is evenly distributed on the far end of the bat, which is good for making the bat harder to swing.

In the newly designed torpedo bats, weight is distributed closer to the handle of the bat, 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 said. 

The “sweet spot” he’s referring to is an area on the bat where vibrations from hitting a baseball are the most minimal.

“It’s not obvious, but bats are actually very flexible,” Zentner 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.”

Faster swings are just one possible reason why torpedo bats work. Another possible theory that Zentner proposed is that the sweet spot actually becomes slightly larger due to the shifting of mass in the redesigned torpedo bat. With a larger sweet spot that extends towards the batter’s hands, more of the energy of the swing gets transmitted to the ball.

“In Anthony Volpe’s case, that’s one of the things that’s happening. He’s a little behind the ball, he tends to hit it a little bit closer to the handle, and so extending the sweet spot slightly closer to the handle might help out,” Zentner said.

Zentner leans toward his second theory as to why the torpedo bats may help hitters, but affirmed that there is not yet concrete proof 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,” Zentner said. 

Not all Yankees players are using the torpedo bat. Star outfielder Aaron Judge, the reigning AL MVP who is off to a record-breaking start, opted to stick with his traditional bat, which has seen him already slam six home runs this year. 

But for players who have picked up the new bat, like New York infielders Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Anthony Volpe, the results speak for themselves. Both players are smashing the ball — Chisholm already has five home runs this year, and Volpe has four. 

Cincinnati’s Elly De La Cruz also had a monster night during his first use of the torpedo bat, smacking two home runs and driving in a career-high seven in a 14-3 blowout of Texas back on March 31. 

Here in Pittsburgh, several Pirates players voiced interest in trying the bats out. Utility man Jared Triolo and shortstop Isiah Kiner-Falefa told Noah Hiles of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that they are excited to try them out. 

“I already have a few on the way,” Triolo said. 

“I’m hoping the staff, they just bring some in here,” Kiner-Falefa said. “Until I use one, I don’t know, but I think it’s pretty cool. One good swing and I’m taking it into the game. If it drastically improves the power, then why not give it a shot?”

Zentner is unconvinced that the bats have a major impact, but joked that, as a Mets fan, it may just 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,” Zentner said.

“There’s so much superstition about baseball. So I think people have success with one bat type, and they just get obsessed with using that bat type. It may have a small effect, but I think if the data strongly points to them being effective, then, yeah, people migrate towards it for sure,” Zentner said.

Baseball is a sport driven by sample sizes, and six games out of 162 are hardly enough to draw concrete conclusions. Nonetheless, the baseball world is buzzing at the possibility of the bats causing a hitting revolution.