Baseball’s Torpedo Bats are High Controversy, But Running Did it First

Bombs Away

On the first day of the 2025 Major League Baseball season, a few bombs fell.

One of them was a home run by New York Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe, a bottom-of-the-lineup batter who has posted underwhelming offensive numbers over his last year of play. The next day, he hit another one, helping lead his team to a 20-9 rout of the Milwaukee Brewers. A few days later, another one. Followed by one more. Less than a week into the 2025 baseball season, Anthony Volpe was already a third of the way to his home run total from last year. 

Maybe it was a clubhouse contagion; after all, the Yankees did set a club record of nine home runs in a single game during the Brewers blowout. Or, maybe it’s the bat bombs. More specifically, the torpedo bats– a customized bat design that’s sending shockwaves through the sport.

A Century of Lumber

Since the beginning of baseball, bats have been basic in their design. A long piece of lumber with a cap and barrel at one end, tapering off into a handle, with a knob on the other end closest to the hands. From Ruth to Rutschman, from Dimaggio to De La Cruz, through dead ball and live ball, between mound heights and base widths, the bat has been consistent. So consistent, that the two main measurements of a bat have remained largely unchanged since 1869: 1) it may not exceed 42 inches in length, and 2) the barrel width may not exceed 2.61 inches in diameter. Anything within that is fair game, as long as the stick is made of wood.

For the next 150 years, that’s pretty much how it stayed. Different woods for different weights, from hickory to ash to maple to birch. A few hare-brained ideas and modified handle grips came along, but never quite caught on. Overall, the design went unquestioned.

And then came the torpedoes.

 

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The Birth of the Torpedo Bat

Over the past couple decades, baseball– and really, sports in general– have seen a heavy investment in analytics. Popularized in the Michael Lewis book “Moneyball” and the Brad Pitt movie of the same name, complex formulas and micro data points have come to define the game. MIT standouts– math nerds relegated to the university lab in any other historical era– were now full-time staff members hanging out in Major League clubhouses. After all, the slightest edge compounded over an entire 162-game season could mean the difference between the playoffs or an early fall exit, millions of dollars in bonus revenue or an empty stadium in October.

Positional movements in the field were adjusted batter by batter, stat lines were scoured, baserunning angles were dissected step by step. And yet, nobody thought: “What if we change the equipment?” A wheel is a wheel, after all; if it’s worked for this long, why try and change it? Eventually, someone did think to give it a shot. And yes, it was an MIT physicist who brought it to the table.

In a recent interview with The New York Times, that man– Aaron Leahardt, now a Marlins coach but then a Yankees minor league assistant in 2022– thought to ask the question: “Where are you trying to hit the ball? Where are you trying to make contact?”

Because it turns out that not every baseball player is making contact in the “sweet spot” of the bat, that widest part of the barrel that gives the most power output when it connects with the ball. A lot of players– like Anthony Volpe of the New York Yankees– hit the ball lower on the bat, towards the label. More often than not, they were wasting that swing on a thin part of wood, like hitting a bedknob with a broomstick, resulting in weak fly balls or singles instead of hard liners and home runs. On near misses, there were less foul balls and more strikeouts.

So what if they just moved the sweet spot down? After all, there was nothing in the rule book that said you couldn’t. The only things outlined were the rules on length, diameter, and composition. Under 42, below 2.61, no corking, all wood. Quietly, they began looking at individual players’ swings, then building a new style of bat that moved the fatter part of the barrel closer to the hands, while tapering it off at the far end to save weight, a shape that resembled a – you guessed it – torpedo. 

One of the earliest players to adopt it was 35-year-old Giancarlo Stanton of the Yankees, a former MVP who had seen a dip in his numbers since 2021. In 2024, he started using the torpedo bat and ended the season with his highest OPS in three years, including seven home runs in the postseason. 

Some of his teammates soon followed suit. During their first series against the Brewers to start off the season, five Yankees players used the torpedo bats to combine for 10 of the club’s record-setting 18 home runs in its first four games, according to The New York Times. Four of the others came from Aaron Judge, arguably the greatest home run hitter in the game right now, who is still sticking to a traditional bat. 

Since that series, the buzz hasn’t stopped. More players are looking to cash in on the craze, while others are asking the inevitable question: Is it cheating?

If you’re a baseball fan turned runner or vice versa, then all of this may seem like déjá vu to you. The idea of a sport taking a piece of equipment that’s been largely unchanged in a century, working within limits to maximize its performance output, releasing that product into the world and seeing records served up and taken down, all accompanied by a generous side dish of controversy.

It’s the carbon-plated super shoe controversy, all over again.

Nike Did It First

For those who don’t remember, or who came here by way of googling “torpedo bat,” first there was the Vaporfly. In 2017, Nike forever changed the sport of running when it released the Nike Vaporfly 4%, a shoe designed for racing distances up to the marathon. For years, Nike had been developing the shoe in its labs, developing a unique shoe structure that would soon be the gold standard in running footwear. 

Unlike every shoe until that point, Nike managed to combine four things into one shoe: energy return, stability, light weight, and cushion. In the past, you could have a lot of cushion, but too much weight. More stability but less energy return. Light weight, but no cushion. Something was always sacrificed. 

With the Vaporfly 4% (a shoe that promised performance benefits of up to 4%), Nike used a ZoomX midsole with a shockingly high stack height (close to 40 mm), using a proprietary blend of Pebax, a lightweight, bouncy polymer foam that gave great energy return. The comfort and performance were covered, but Nike also threw in a full-length carbon fiber plate, which acted as both a stabilizer for the foam midsole, and a propulsion mechanism for the foot when coming out of the stride. 

Much like the torpedo bat, the shoe sent shockwaves through the sport. Until then, no rules existed for the design of shoes, other than a vague “shoes must not be constructed so as to give athletes any unfair assistance” line of language that was open to interpretation. Wile E. Coyote rocket-propelled roller skates? Probably not. Everything else? Probably maybe.

The Vaporfly threw everything into question. At the core of the argument was Nike’s innovation. In developing the shoe in secret for the past several years, Nike had positioned itself so far ahead of its competitors that the playing field was now a chasm, with Nike standing on the cliff peak while everyone else sat stunned in the bottom of the canyon.

Records were falling left and right; in a one-to-one matchup of talents, the Vaporfly and its souped-up sidekick in the Alphafly would routinely come out on top. At the time, the question of fairness came up in nearly every conversation about carbon-plated running footwear. Does the carbon plate give an unfair advantage? Do records in this new super shoe era need to have an asterisk? Does this even count as running?

The original Nike Alphafly

Something had to be done before things got out of hand. Within a short time, World Athletics, the international governing body for the sport of athletics, handed down a definitive set of rules for shoe designs on race day, which remain in place to this day.

The two most important rules are this: First, the stack height must not exceed 40 mm for a standard sample size shoe, as measured at two distinct points from the shoe– 12% of length in the heel, and 75% of length in the forefoot. Second, the shoe must not contain more than one rigid structure (e.g. carbon plate, blade, etc.), unless it remains on the same plane. 

Every super shoe has had to work within those parameters if they were to be worn by elite athletes on race day.

Running broke the rules before they made them, but baseball already had those rules in place before they bent them. The creators of the torpedo bat looked at the set of measurements and said: “How can we work within these to maximize performance?” Now, shoe companies are doing the same since the World Athletics rules came into place.

Some brands, like Mizuno, are literally cutting corners off the stack height measurements. With the Wave Rebellion Pro, Mizuno has circumvented the World Athletics rules by cutting a hard angle into the heel of that shoe, so the official stack height measurement comes under the legal limit set by World Athletics. However, the middle portion of the shoe features an enormous foam section, measuring over 50 mm in stack height. There’s nothing in the rule book that says that it can’t be done that way, and so it was done that way.

Other brands are diving deeper into the innovation and performance side, designing shoes made specifically for one distance and one race only. Adidas has famously done this with the Adizero Adios Pro Evo 1, a $500 marathon shoe with an uncompressed block of midsole foam, coming in at an almost impossibly light 4.87 ounces (141 grams), as much as a pair of hiking socks. Despite its eye-popping price tag, Adidas can’t keep it in stock. 

There’s even some theories that Nike has found a way to circumvent the “two rigid structure rule” by placing a more hardened rubber section beneath the Zoom Air units in the Alphafly 3, creating a sandwich-like effect with the full-length carbon fiber plate that runs on top of the pods. It’s not a plate, it’s just a hard rubber. 

The designs are not without their downsides. There’s been plenty of discussion and debate in the running shoe world about the effect of carbon plated shoes on running form and potential injury, with varying degrees of evidence both for and against it. In the same way, the torpedo bats are already drumming up talk of whether their design can lead to injuries down the road. Yankees star Giancarlo Stanton is currently on the injured list with tennis elbow in both of his arms; according to The New York Times, when asked about it, he told reporters in March: “Probably some bat adjustments. That’s all I could attest it to.”  (It should also be noted that Giancarlo Stanton is the only player in baseball to have a bat speed of over 80 miles per hour, as listed by mlb.com.)

The Future of the Sport

Whatever the case, one thing is for certain: as with carbon-plated race day shoes, anything that gives an athlete an edge is also a thing that people will spend money on. Right now, bat manufacturers like Victus and Marucci are going all-in on the hype, with models ranging from $169-$189. And for years, race day running shoes have sold in the $230-$300 range and could tick even higher with the increased tariffs on goods from China and Vietnam.

Others will point to the fact that plenty of runners win races in shoes that don’t have a Swoosh, just like plenty of batters are hitting balls out of the park with good ol’ fashioned maple sticks. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable what the combination of carbon fiber plates and lighter, bouncier foams have done for running, as records have fallen and continue to fall in the past five years.

In terms of baseball, whether it’s a fad or a trend that will see full-scale adoption as a response to pitchers who routinely hit 100 miles per hour on the radar gun, that remains to be seen. But the bats are here for now. In both baseball and running, it’s the creativity that counts. Working within the set of rules to gain an edge could be the difference between a tenth place finish or a spot on the podium as a world champion. In both cases, a revolutionary change has created a ton of conversation and controversy, signaling a potential seismic shift in the sport. 

It’s not cheating, not yet anyway. Unless the Yankees beat my beloved Orioles in the American League Championship Series come October. Then yes, it’s a sacrilege to the beautiful sport of baseball.

In that case, ban all the bombs.