The Torpedo Bat Is a Classically Inconspicuous Design Story
The baseball bat’s shape has been essentially unchanged for a century — until now.
As most of you know, I spent 25 years writing about sports uniforms, logos, equipment design, and related aesthetic issues before retiring from that project last May. In the nearly 11 months since then, I haven’t missed Uni Watch at all, and there hasn’t been a single time I’ve thought to myself, “Oh man, now there’s a sports design story I wish I could cover” — until now.
The current development that’s grabbed me is the rise of the so-called torpedo bat, a new baseball bat design that moves the bat’s barrel or “sweet spot” a bit lower, toward the hitter’s hands, resulting in a bat that looks a bit like a juggler’s pin. The basic theory is that the torpedo bat moves the sweet spot to the area on the bat where most players tend to make contact, thereby yielding increased power and production without changing the bat’s length or weight. The design is legal because its specs are still within the guidelines governing a bat’s maximum length and circumference.
The torpedo bat was invented a few years ago by a former physics professor named Aaron Leanhardt. At the time, he was working as a hitting consultant with the New York Yankees, although he’s currently a coach for the Florida Marlins. A few big league players used his invention in 2023 and ’24, but nobody paid much attention until the start of this season, when the Yankees hit an unprecedented slew of home runs in their first few games and credited their success to the torpedo bat, leading to frenzy of media attention.
The reason I love this story — and the reason I think it’s just as suitable for Inconspicuous Consumption as it is for Uni Watch — is that a baseball bat is a perfect example of a quotidian object that we mostly take for granted. Its design has been largely unchanged over the past century or so — that’s why the torpedo bat looks so weird, because we’ve all internalized what a bat is “supposed” to look like. Or to put it another way, we had intuitively assumed that the baseball bat had already reached a state of peak refinement. But now it turns out that a major innovation, based on a fairly simple design adjustment, has been waiting to be discovered this whole time.
The torpedo shape is probably the most significant design revision that the baseball bat has undergone since the days of Babe Ruth, but it’s not the only one. Players, manufacturers, and designers have been tinkering with the bat’s details all along, often in very subtle ways, hoping to wring a bit more performance out of this most simple piece of sports gear — a stick of wood. Here are some of the things they’ve tried: