THE New York Yankees may have revolutionized the sport of baseball, and one man is at the center of it.
Former Yankees staffer Aaron Leanhardt invented the “torpedo bat,” which is at the center of attention in the MLB world today.
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Leanhardt took an unconventional path to becoming a baseball coach.
He actually started out as a scientist, earning his PhD from MIT.
Leanhardt went on to work at NASA after earning his degree.
He then became a professor of physics at the University of Michigan for over seven years.
However, at 40 years old Leanhardt decided to pursue being in baseball.
He got his first break at Dawson Community College in Montana before becoming a coach in the Yankees system.
Leanhardt eventually got moved up to the major league club and worked to integrate analytics into the team’s every day operations.
He is now a coach for the Miami Marlins, but his impact has remained with the Yankees.
There are five Yankees players using his special torpedo bats: Cody Bellinger, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Paul Goldschmidt, Anthony Volpe and Austin Wells.
Those players were a combined 18-for-56 with nine home runs in the team’s first three games of the season.
The genius of the torpedo bat is that it rearranges the shape of the barrel specifically to each player’s needs.
If a player gets jammed more often, the barrel is moved down the bat.
If a player is hitting the ball off the end of the bat, the barrel gets moved up.
“It’s just about making the bat as heavy and as fat as possible in the area where you’re trying to do damage on the baseball,” Leanhardt told The Athletic.
It’s all about the “sweet spot” in the bat, which Leanhardt has effectively personalized for each player.
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“They’re going to point to a location on the bat that is probably six or seven inches down from the tip of the bat,” Leanhardt continued.
“That’s where the sweet spot typically is. It’s just through those conversations where you think to yourself, why don’t we exchange how much wood we’re putting on the tip versus how much we’re putting in the sweet spot?
“That’s the original concept right there. Just try to take all that excess weight and try to put it where you’re trying to hit the ball and then in exchange try to take the thinner diameter that used to be at the sweet spot and put that on the tip.”
The jury is still out on these bats. They fall within MLB regulations, but if offense gets too good the league could opt to ban them.
For now, more and more players are going to start using them to get a leg up on opposing pitchers.