HN Reader

I think it's quite cool (disclaimer: I am indeed a dirty Yankees fan)

Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you that has a fast pitch machine (usually maxes out 75-85mph which is 20+ mph less than your typical MLB fastball), give it a shot. When you hit the ball away from the sweet spot, especially on the parts closer to your hands, it really freaking hurts and throws off subsequent swings.

If the few players who are using this bat tend to hit that spot naturally, it makes a lot of sense to modify the bat to accommodate it, within the rules like they've done here. Hitting is super, super difficult especially today with how far we're pushing pitchers. Love seeing them try to innovate.

Plus, reminder, most of the team isn't using it. Judge clobbered the ball that day with his normal bat. Brewer's pitching is injured, and the starter that day was a Yankee last year and the team is intimately familiar with his game.

If only the Yankees get access to it (e.g. they patented it and won't let other teams use it) then I could see it as an unfair advantage. In most other areas of America life, though, this innovation would be allowed or even celebrated.

I imagine it will go the way of the brilliant strategic innovation a few years back of shifting defenders heavily depending on the batter's statistical hitting patterns. It'll get banned because it makes the game more boring. If home runs happen all the time, they lose their excitement. I imagine it's quite expensive or impossible to shift the outfield walls back farther in most MLB stadiums.

I actually would love more of a no holds barred evolutionary battle in the MLB [1] but I know it's not gonna happen.

[1] https://youtu.be/gTmLz9B8wls

He never said why it's bad, just that players he thinks suck should continue to suck and he doesn't like that they don't suck anymore.

He briefly alluded to a valid point but went no where with it about how it may affect little league and college with less money, but that is completely separate from MLB teams using millions of dollars for custom bats.

"you can’t just make a new bat and ruin over 100 years of baseball"

If this jabroni was in charge of sports, there'd be no forward pass, no three-point line, no fosbury flop. Sports should be frozen in a specific moment of this guy's choosing. MLB batting averages have been on a steady, multi-decade decline as pitching quality and strategy has improved[1], so God forbid we do something to add some offense.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/mlb-vanishing-offense-allstar-b48...

Two players used the bats. I'm not a Yankees fan, but all these articles are making it seem like the bats are the reason. That does not explain why the rest of the lineup went off. Perhaps poor pitching is the better explanation. Too much is being made of these bats.

Also, golf club technology basically does the same thing. Everything is about making a bigger sweet spot. Oversize drivers and irons didn't seem to ruin the game.

This seems to most help with guys who were hitting the ball most often not at the sweet spot. By moving the sweet spot to where they are hitting the ball, they might gain some power.

A bat needs to be round, a solid piece of wood, less than a certain length and less than a certain diameter. The actual shape is not defined.

This is how modern cricket bats are designed, with the bulk of the wood located in the “sweet spot”.

In fact they have undergone a similar evolution. You can see that in the variations history on the Wikipedia page [0], as well as the photo of the old bats versus modern ones [1].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_bat#Variations

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cricket_bat#/media/File%3AHi...

My son - a baseball player - saw these in use this past week and noted:

“ That was dumb… They should have saved them for the playoffs…”

… and I can’t help but agree.

I think the media is attributing too much to the bats. I was at the Yankees game, and the wind was blowing straight out and hard. Many of the home runs I saw hit would have been fly outs on a day with more normal wind.

Im glad this landed here so I can ask:

Physics nerds, would a “larger contact area” give the baseball more velocity?

I’ve been speculating that moving the mass lower effectively increases bat speed because its a “shorter bat”, but all of the commentary is acting like the larger barrel is “more power”.

I’d expect larger barrel increases odds of contact, not increased power transfer?

(But I also think of a car with bike diameter wheels and that could obviously change the power transfer)

Maybe it's just me, but if I worked for a school as close to Fenway as MIT, I sure wouldn't risk putting my name on custom bats for the Yankees!

I've always wondered what the technological development of F1 would look like in other sports. This feels pretty close.

Sports advancements like this are super cool. This reminds me of how Dick Fosbury changed the high jump in 1968.

It was nice of them to reveal this early in the season—I would have loved to see the drama if they revealed it during the postseason so other teams didn't have time to catch up.

As a kid, my all-time favorite Christmas present was a Gen-1x baseball bat. It was my first -3 bat, and promised a new metal alloy that would help me hit harder. Talk about sparking the imagination!

Without question, one of the high points of childhood was going out and trying to make that bat pop.

A lot of long-term baseball fans “get it” when it comes to creative tech in the game and it’s fun to see something new with bats.

The only thing I want to point out is that baseball (and all big sports) have always been a technological arms race and always will be. It’s just part of it.

> Unfortunately, the MLB reviewed the torpedo bats after the game and somehow had zero issues with them?

"Unfortunately, the MLB reviewed the torpedo bats after the game and somehow had zero issues with them", isn't a question; adding a question mark just makes me read you with an obnoxious up-tone.

Did it really take 125+ years for someone to realize the bat does not need to evenly taper? This seems like some seriously low lying fruit.

Are we entering the F1 stage of baseball and other sports? I bet there’s room for optimization with gloves and shoes and uniforms. I’m surprised teams haven’t made use of mobile recovery units when visiting away teams (instead of hotels). And there’s still gotta be ways to work around fatigue related to travel and time zone changes. I’m still surprised how basic and limited home team locker rooms can be. There are probably cool tech and social/psych solutions.

I'm genuinely surprised this hasn't been done before now.

From the title I was expecting genetically modified Bats that could fly out and retrieve foul balls

I suspect this may result in more pitches away to these batters so they have to make contact on the narrower end of the bat.

I.e. it's a move that may well have a counter move.

Change we can see is better than change behind the scenes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juiced_ball_theory, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/juiced-baseballs

Baseball is the king of misleading small samples. It’s usually best not to jump to any conclusions as the article does so early in the season (ban them! After 3 games?!). There is a lot of randomness in the data.

And if the season proves that these bats are indeed juicier than others? Probably MLB will let it lie. Offense is down enough already and all of the recent rules changes are intended to support offense.

Interesting outcome of Saturday's game -- most of the Yankee's runs came as a result of their 9 homers, and they let up 9 runs -- which, defensively, is not great. The Brewers scored an average 4.78 runs per game in 2024.

Kinda suggests the Yankees aren't all great at playing baseball, except for hitting home runs, but that's all that really matters.

Love this! I helped make wooden oars, that were used by competitors in international rowing competitions, that had blades designed by someone at MIT, back in the day, on a computer(golley gee), but we made them by hand, and as they were, only wood, they were legal for use, and all the champions used them. we also made oars for "bostan bay bantry boat rigs" that won while crewed by inner city kids, we cheated a bit, and snuck some carbon fibre in but nobody even knew what that was, 18' oars, 2 kids to each, 16 oars per boat, plus the tiller. ash for the majors was sometimes sourced from granpa's farm in Pa, which he was proud of, take me into the woods to.show how strait they were, and how the deer had et, everything down to the dirt. next up, would be expoloring how a little texture from a poorly finnished bat, might add a little energy transfer to the ball

It would be fun to see how far you could hit a baseball or golf ball if you could make the bat/club out of any material. Or how fast someone could swim if you could wear anything (like those suits that were banned from the olympics) and things like that.

Shouldn’t pitchers be able to adapt to this? If the sweet spot has moved, just pitch where the sweet spot isn’t.

Here is what I have learned from people who religiously follow various kind of sports which intersect with technology:

A new tech will be allowed to stand if everyone can take advantage of it equally AND it does not make the sport too boring.

Gotta get that ad and sponsor money.

Not a baseball fan, but I’m curious if the MLB will go the F1 route (ie ban the “hack”) or embrace it as it will probably make for more entertaining games. Home runs are a good thing, right?

Sounds like those hammer head tennis rackets. Strange that it didn’t happen decades ago. And nothing wrong with such innovation just making game more fast and powerful.

The typical baseball bat's balance - very different from say a sword's - has always felt wrong to me, and i've just chalked it up to my not being a baseball player and thus not understanding. The new shape seems to improve the balance toward the centuries established for swords, etc.

I think that’s a good thing. As an outsider who only recently started following baseball I can say that what makes the game quite boring is a difficulty mismatch: throwing the ball is easy, hitting it is quite hard (many MLB players have batting averages of 0.250 or below) which means that a typical baseball game consists of many throws, many strike outs and only occasional hits an runs.

I'm wary this will change baseball for the worse. Already, we've seen the power game become more and more dominant since the steroid era. You see less of the base running and nickel and dime baseball. It's all about home runs. If it were up to me, they would make the bats deader, not more lively.

Hasn't equipment been evolving since the beginning of the game? Why would this be out of line with that?

Adding yet another thing for neurodivergent fans of baseball to argue over is fun! That said, some of this must be statistical anomaly. Let’s give it at least a few hundred at-bats per player using it.

If you look at an exhibit of bats over time, you will see that size, weight, width and shape have all varied quite a bit between players even if on the same team and era, and this makes me skeptical that some new shape is really going to invalidate every baseball stadium’s length and field overnight. If it does, MLB will outlaw it. See aluminum bats for example.

I’m not saying MIT physicists can’t help hitters with going deep, I bet they can. But given the tools at their disposal - bat shape in this case - I’m skeptical that they are going to create a new era of hitting for all. I guess we’ll see soon.

Innovations are always fun and disruptive at first, until the competition gets wise and adapts.

By concentrating weight in the center of the bat hitters will be less able to protect the outside and inside of the zone.

I don't expect to see the torpedos past June.

That immediately reminded me of George Constanza suggesting Yankees players should wear cotton at the ballpark to improve their performance.

Man, I got a really sweet bat on clearance the last time around they banned some new design. It’s great for the batting cage. Keep an eye on this one, might be $10 out the door next year.

Matching their franchise record for HRs in a game in only 4 innings is wild!

Since golf has had all sorts of changes in clubs over the years and baseball hadn't, I had assumed the only reason this hadn't been done years ago is because the rules were very prescriptive.

This morning on the radio, I heard this opinion (paraphrasing): "Misses become tips, tips become slices, slices become hits..."

Cool but this article is AI slop. It's borderline unreadable, though I guess it looks great to Google.

Wow, that author is one grumpy fellow.

Ready for games at Fenway to be 90% HRs

The higher pitch velocity made something like this inevitable. Remember when a pitcher who threw 95 was a big deal?

Oh no! Baseball might get slightly interesting! Quick! Ban the heretics!

This article is a great example of why baseball is such an incredibly boring sport.

Next season everyone has this, and then what? All the historical stats are busted.

if it leads to more home runs i'm against it.

if it leads to more solid hits and plays in the infield, i'm for it.

unclear which one, i look forward to finding out more.

given the rules (solid wood, max 2.61" and 42")...

I wonder if they couldn't have non-round profiles. Might be able to steer the ball, like a golf driver or add spin like some sort of racket.

Would anyone care if he just used a shorter bat that didn’t get thinner?

Elly De La Cruz mashed two 400+ plus bombs to dead center with a torpedo bat today. Whatever helps the Reds hit homers I’m fine with.

Hard to imagine whatever advantage this is affording won't be nullified by pitchers within a season. The arms race is getting insane.

Cool. Make it open-source for the rest of the league.

Otherwise this is just more proof that Yankees fans are the same kind of people who would cheer when the casino wins another slot machine pull.

My first thought is that there must be something very wrong about this. They have moved the skill of hitting from the player to the "skill" of the bat. I am surprised MLB allowed it. I don't see it too far different than corking the bat.

Good. Baseball isn't a serious spectator sport. It's only interesting to statisticians. Now there will be more work for them to do, adjusting for bat type in addition to stadium dimensions, rule changes, etc. to compare players across eras. And more HRs might make it a little more interesting to spectators as long as the OBP doesn't increase to prolong an already too long game.