It appears the New York Yankees’ use of torpedo bats in their first series of the season against the Milwaukee Brewers has created a chain reaction throughout the Majors.
Other teams immediately began to co-opt the idea, the Minnesota Twins’ Ryan Jeffers and Junior Caminero of the Tampa Bay Rays as some of the first outside of the Yankees organization to use a torpedo bat.
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The Los Angeles Dodgers were just as unaware as the rest of the league about the bowling-pin-shaped bat’s existence, which is surprising given they have been at the forefront of trends for quite a while. But that’s now poised to change as Max Muncy and Kiké Hernández among the Dodgers who will test a torpedo bat, according to Bill Plunkett of the Southern California News Group:
A number of Dodgers – including Max Muncy and Kiké Hernandez – have ordered versions of the “torpedo bat” from their suppliers (MaxBat and Marucci, respectively) to try out.
“Those guys are just good,” Muncy said, refusing to credit the bat technology with all of the Yankees’ success. “Maybe it helped them. If it did, I plan on finding out.”
With all of the hoops a bat has to go through in order to be approved by MLB, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts was surprised the Yankees were able to keep it under wraps and that the bats are legal given their abnormal look.
“There’s a lot of regulations that a bat has to go through to be able to be Major League Baseball approved, and so for it to pass all those things is sort of surprising, given how it looks, and something that I think just wasn’t on anyone’s radar,” Roberts said.
“So that kind of just came out of nowhere, but I’m sure they went through the right protocols, obviously. So that’s surprising in that sense.”
The offensive explosion the Yankees had in their 20-9 win over the Brewers on Saturday, which featured a franchise-record nine home runs for the Bronx Bombers, called the legality of the torpedo bats into question.
As of now the bats are completely legal as despite the unique look, they have been crafted in accordance with MLB Rule 3.02 that states bats cannot be more than 2.61 inches in diameter and 42 inches in length.
How will pitchers adapt to torpedo bats?
With the prevalence of torpedo bats around the league poised to dramatically increase over the course of the season unless something drastic happens, pitchers are going to need to adapt on the fly in order to combat what makes the design effective.
“I think they’re starting to gather information on what pitches, locations, could potentially combat a Torpedo bat. I’m sure they’re doing their due diligence as well right now,” Roberts said when asked how he envisions pitchers attacking hitters who use these bats going forward.
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