When it’s a torpedo bat.
Last week I looked at baseball’s new torpedo bats in a humourous light. But I did want to take a more serious look, because bat evolution has been part of the tale of baseball since its beginning. Back in the day bats featured long lengths and heavier weights. These days, bats are in the mid-30 inch length and mid-30 ounce weight. Current regulations limit bats to 42 inches in length and a maximum diameter of 2.61 inches. 1 (There is some other stuff in there that is not terribly relevant to the torpedo bat.) And that’s it. Nothing about where the widest part of the bat need be nor the overall shape—merely a round, solid piece of wood.
The solid piece of wood is connected to corked bats. At my age I remember seeing the ESPN clips of Sammy Sosa’s corked bat in 2003 and the story of Albert Belle’s bat, stolen from the umpire’s room.
The torpedo bat, however, is not corked, instead it uses increased mass at the bat’s sweet spot, where it generates the greatest exit velocities when the batter hits the pitch. This graphic from ESPN shows how this works.
Overall I like the graphic. The use of contrasting red and blue does a good job highlighting, particularly at the end where the normal bat continues with its edges running parallel as a regular cylinder. The torpedo bat changes into a cone with its top sliced off then rounded. I might have exaggerated the vertical dimensions of the bat illustration, but it still works.
Additionally, as I understand the design, it maximises the diameter of the bat to the aforementioned 2.61 inches. I have heard—but not confirmed—most bats do not reach the full diameter. If that is true, perhaps an illustration where the red lines fell below the maximum diameter of the torpedo bat could do a better job differentiating between the two shapes.
I prefer the above illustration to that produced by the Athletic/New York Times, which attempts a similar distinction.
I think ESPN’s overlay better shows the difference and that the Athletic’s wood pattern distracts from the graphic overall. Whereas ESPN uses the solid red vs. blue hatching to distinguish between the two shapes.
Of course that begets the question, why doesn’t every batter use the torpedo bat?
Suffice it to say, some players are better at hitting the ball consistently at the same spot on the bat. If a hitter can repeatedly make contact at a specific spot along the length of the bat, it makes sense to concentrate the mass of the bat at that spot for better hard contact. If, however, a hitter spreads his contact out along the length of the barrel, he probably wants a more evenly distributed mass to help create a better spread of good contact.
Regardless, as I wrote on Friday, the torpedo does not look like a torpedo. If anything, the normal baseball bat looks more like a torpedo than a torpedo bat.
Credit for the ESPN piece goes to ESPN’s graphics department.
Credit for the Athletic’s piece goes to Drew Jordan.
