Culture
Torpedo bats are making a lot of noise — but they’ve been quietly in MLB for a few years
Two days after the New York Yankees’ offensive outburst in the Bronx made torpedo bats the talk of baseball, Cincinnati Reds shortstop Elly De La Cruz decided to try one for the first time in batting practice. By the end of the Reds’ 14-3 rout of the Texas Rangers on Monday night, the 23-year-old slugger had used it to go 4-for-5 with two home runs, a double and seven RBIs.
“I just wanted to know if it felt good,” he said, “and it definitely does.”
But while the bats have only recently become a major storyline across the league, it turns out that experiments with the uniquely shaped bats that caused a national uproar over the weekend have actually been happening quietly across baseball — and for a long time.
“It became viral,” New York Mets manager Carlos Mendoza said Monday. “But it’s nothing new for us.”
Aaron Leanhardt, a 48-year-old Miami Marlins coach, has been credited by many with being the brains behind the bats, which were first highlighted when Yankees players used them in a franchise-record nine-home run performance and 20-9 win over the Milwaukee Brewers on Saturday.
“There were definitely some major-league players that swung it in the big leagues in 2023,” Leanhardt said Monday. “As well as some minor-league players who swung it in some real baseball games in 2023, and it just kind of built up throughout 2024 into what it is today.”
The bats won’t be under the radar anymore. Players across the sport have started asking the manufacturers for their own versions of the bats. Retailers started selling them to the public online. Chandler Bats is now offering a model designed for Yankees third baseman Jazz Chisholm Jr. for $239 per bat. Victus is offering three models, one a signature Anthony Volpe version, while Marucci has a Francisco Lindor “torpedo pro exclusive” bat for sale.
The bats differ from traditional models due to their torpedo shape, which comes from redistributing its weight so that the most dense part, or the “sweet spot,” is closer to the handle.
Birch seems to be the preferred wood for the bats, which were designed to help hitters make truer contact in an age where more and more pitchers are throwing 100 mph and offering nastier repertoires than ever thanks to technical and analytical advancements.
Major League Baseball has said the bats are completely within its rules.
“It’s kind of exciting,” Los Angeles Dodgers infielder Max Muncy said. “We just had a long conversation about (how) in the 170 years and whatever that baseball has been around, the number of changes to the baseball bat has been minimal.”
For decades, most players swung bats made of ash until Barry Bonds helped popularize maple bats in the late 1990s and early 2000s.
“I mean,” Muncy said, “everyone swung ash for 140 years and then you had one guy swing maple, and then they came out with birch, and really, that’s been all the changes. There’s been different shapes, but there hasn’t really been anything as drastic as maybe what this is right now.”
The hype around the bats made for an unusual scene at LoanDepot Park on Monday. The Marlins made Leanhardt available to reporters outside of their dugout. When he was with the Yankees last season, Leanhardt didn’t speak to the media.
“There’s a lot more cameras here today than I’m used to,” he said. “ … It’s definitely been surreal for the last couple of days.”
Leanhardt — through conversations with coaches, players, MLB and bat companies — developed prototypes that eventually landed in the hands of Yankees players. Chisholm, Volpe, Cody Bellinger, Paul Goldschmidt and Austin Wells are among the Yankees using them this season. However, right fielder Aaron Judge — perhaps the best power hitter in the game — said he will not.
In a video posted to Instagram, Brett Laxton, a bat maker for Marucci Sports and a former big-leaguer, said that Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton was using one of their torpedo bats when he hit seven home runs in the postseason last year. Rookie Jasson Domínguez also told reporters that Stanton had been using one.
Trevino was with the Yankees last season. He said he first picked one up in spring training in 2024.
“At first, I was like, ‘No way,’” he said. “Then I tried it. I liked it.”
Trevino then used them during workouts and spring training games before taking them into the regular season. He added there’s a complicated process for making the bats. It starts with designers taking the model with which a player is already familiar and adjusting it. He said he’s been able to order barrel sizes in small, medium and large.
“It’s making your barrel bigger where you want to hit the ball,” Trevino said.
“Maybe the eureka moment really was when players started to point to where they were trying to hit the ball and they noticed themselves that it was not the fattest part of the bat,” Leanhardt said. “They noticed themselves that the tip was the fattest part of the bat and 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?’
“At the end of the day, we were able to find guys who were willing to go with it.”
Though word has traveled fast around the game about the new style of bat, not everybody has been sold on them.
“None of the players have said anything about using them,” Houston Astros manager Joe Espada said. “I have never held the bat or seen one of them. I know some of our guys in the minor leagues were using them, but I’m not going to comment on a piece of baseball equipment I’ve never seen.”
“I don’t have a big opinion,” Reds manager Terry Francona said. “I think if you go back and look at where some of these pitches were (thrown against the Yankees), it might not be the bat.”
“I guess it’s this craze,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “I just haven’t dug into it. It’s certainly early, and there’s people talking about it, but I don’t think any of our guys swing that bat, so I’m not sure what it is.”
Several players said they put in orders for their own torpedo bats after seeing the Yankees’ power surge over the weekend.
“I have learned absolutely nothing other than that they look like bowling pins,” Dodgers utility man Enrique Hernández said. “I ordered some. All of the cool kids are doing it.”
A real question remains: Do they actually make a difference?
“I think that’s still up for debate,” said Minnesota Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers, who has been using a torpedo bat. “I don’t think it’s going to be something that’s an end all, be all for everybody, that everybody’s going to start swinging these bats and become better hitters. I think this might work for some people and might not for others. For me, I’m giving it a little bit of a trial period, see how I like it. The thoughts behind them seem good, but I think there’s still a lot of trial and error with it. It’s so new.”
“I had teammates last year (with the Yankees) that asked me if I wanted to try it, but it never caught my attention,” Mets right fielder Juan Soto said, according to the New York Post. “But, yeah, I would try it.”
And are they here to stay?
“I don’t know,” Detroit Tigers first baseman Spencer Torkelson said. “I feel good with my bat right now. I’m not going to change anything. But maybe one day.”
“It might be one of those phases … that comes and goes,” Jeffers said. “I think time will tell.”
— The Athletic‘s C. Trent Rosecrans, Fabian Ardaya, Dan Hayes, Will Sammon, Chris Kirschner, Cody Stavenhagen, Matt Gelb, Britt Ghiroli and Chandler Rome contributed to this story.
(Top photo of Elly De La Cruz: Jeff Dean / Getty Images)
Where do you turn when you need advice? A chatbot? A life coach? A wise and trusted friend?
How about a poet? Poets may not be famous for making the best life choices, but because they subject the mess of human existence to the discipline of language, they can be as helpful as any therapist or mentor.
Good poets know the rules and when to break them, which is something they can teach the rest of us.
To wit:
Giving advice is a peculiar literary undertaking. It flourishes in certain popular genres — graduation speeches, newspaper columns, country and western songs and poems like this one — but what, in these contexts, is it really for?
I’m thinking of situations when you don’t urgently need help but nonetheless enjoy reading answers to questions you may not have thought to ask. What interests you isn’t the content of the advice — you could get all the life hacks you want from A.I. — so much as the voice of the person dispensing it.
Wendy Cope is an English poet, born in 1945, who has been a fixture of her country’s literary scene since the 1980s. More recently, her short, buoyant poem “The Orange” has been widely memed online, bringing her to the attention of new readers beyond Britain.
Cope favors rhyme, meter, brisk jokes and tart aperçus. She addresses romance, friendship and the petty absurdities of modern life with disarming good humor. The last line of “The Orange” is “I love you. I’m glad I exist.” Somehow she makes it the opposite of cringe.
This isn’t the kind of poetry you would describe as “confessional.” And yet …
Question 1/7
Stop, if the car is going “clunk”
Or if the sun has made you blind.
Don’t answer e–mails when you’re drunk.
Tap a word above to fill in the highlighted blank.Want to learn this poem by heart? We’ll help.
Fill in the missing words below. You can always refer to the reading by A.O. Scott and full
text above.Let’s start with the first stanza.
A strong sense of place can deeply influence a story, and in some cases, the setting can even feel like a character itself. This week’s literary geography quiz highlights places where authors were born (or lived) that later became locations in their books. To play, just make your selection in the multiple-choice list and the correct answer will be revealed. At the end of the quiz, you’ll find links to the works if you’d like to do further reading.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries, by Eddie S. Glaude Jr.
For those of us in the national memory-keeping business, anniversaries hold near-totemic power. Satisfyingly round units of time, ideally bearing fancy, Latin-derived names, serve as the overburdened pegs on which to hang think pieces and museum exhibits, revisionist documentaries and maudlin public ceremonies. The arbitrary nature of such occasions is precisely what gives them their charge, inviting us to set aside complacency and submit to a comprehensive check-in.
In his new book, “America, U.S.A.,” Eddie S. Glaude Jr. presents an intriguing variation on the genre, seeing the country’s 250th birthday as an anniversary of anniversaries: 50 years since the malaise-ridden, schlock-heavy Bicentennial. A century since the subdued Prohibition-era Sesquicentennial. A century and a half since telegraphed reports of George Armstrong Custer’s defeat by the Lakota and Cheyenne at Little Bighorn rudely interrupted the Gilded Age Republic’s 100th birthday party.
If an anniversary offers a snapshot of a moment, the core of Glaude’s book is an old-timey photo album, a collection of notable episodes from earlier national reckonings, long-ago glances in the mirror. An estimable scholar of Black history, politics and religion at Princeton — best known for “Begin Again,” his 2020 meditation on James Baldwin’s relevance for our times — Glaude focuses, as his subtitle puts it, on “how race shadows the nation’s anniversaries.”
Such celebrations, he contends, have never really been the moments for honest self-reflection they are often advertised to be. Instead, the nation usually shatters the mirror, refusing to accept what it prefers not to see. “American anniversaries are often moments to turn a blind eye to the evils of the past and the present,” Glaude writes, “to suppress the fact of America’s divided soul.”
It’s a clever concept, and, needless to say, perfectly timed. Last year, Glaude notes, the Trump administration executed a hostile takeover of the government’s studiously bipartisan 250th anniversary planning. It is now preparing a program that is certain to conceal more than it reveals about the country ostensibly being celebrated.
Glaude, in no mood for celebration, argues that such omissions and evasions also defined commemorations in the past. In 1875, Frederick Douglass predicted “one grand Centennial hosannah of peace and good will to all the white race of this country.” He was right: The nation reached 100 years old at a crucial moment in the post-Civil War fight over racial equality, with white Northerners ready to give up on Southern Reconstruction. The occasion would help the once-warring sections to reunite around a shared commitment to white supremacy. On May 10, 1876, at the opening of the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia, the police tried to bar Douglass from the grandstand, until a white politician vouched for him.
The 150th anniversary came soon after a resurgent Ku Klux Klan successfully pushed for a restrictive immigration law aimed at keeping America a “Nordic” nation. At the lavishly funded, lightly attended celebrations in Philadelphia, Black veterans of World War I were excluded from marching in the opening parade. A writer with The Associated Negro Press wondered “what was in the breast of those black men who fought to make America safe for Democracy and on Monday stood on the sidelines, forgotten, as the Nordic strode by in all his vain pride.”
By 1976, when the nation marked its Bicentennial, the violence of the ’60s had destroyed any semblance of consensus. Vietnam and Watergate had eroded trust in the government. The commission initially tasked with organizing the anniversary was disbanded amid reports of corruption. Corporations filled the vacuum, Glaude explains, with “star-spangled whoopee cushions; patriotic toilet seats; Liberty hamburgers; red, white and blue beer cans.” The author, around 8 years old at the time, dimly remembers donning a pair of tricolor trousers.
A half-century later, Glaude is refreshingly honest about the depths of his despair. “I do not love America, and never have, especially now,” he writes in one of the more startling opening sentences I’ve read in some time. He dismisses this year’s Semiquincentennial as reaching back “to a storybook America that requires either the banishment of Black people from view or the reduction of our role in the country’s history, so as to affirm America’s ongoing quest to be a more perfect union.”
Undoubtedly true. But Trump doesn’t own the country, at least not yet, nor the 250th anniversary of one of the most radically liberatory and confusingly contradictory events in world history — an inspiration, as Glaude shows, even to critical observers of the American experiment, like Douglass. Far from the revanchist MAGA-palooza in Washington, I suspect this summer’s unasked-for invitation to national soul-searching may surprise us yet.
Despite his despair, Glaude concludes that “the past still offers resources for us to freedom-dream.” So, too, does this book.
AMERICA, U.S.A.: How Race Shadows the Nation’s Anniversaries | By Eddie S. Glaude Jr. | Crown | 270 pp. | $31
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