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Posted

 

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/44477141/mlb-2025-torpedo-bowling-pin-bats-new-york-yankees-taking-baseball

 

From a purely physics standpoint, this is pretty interesting. Hitters gonna love it, pitchers gonna hate it. 

Article does a shitty job of explaining the science. My best attempt at an 8th grade explanation: 

Assuming the mass and length of the bat aren't changed, moving mass closer to the handle makes the bat easier to swing, (meaning you can swing the bat with a higher velocity). Which has two effects: 

1. You can get the bat around quicker, making it easier to hit fastballs.

2. Bat hits the ball with more kinetic energy (bat has same mass, but more rotational velocity), resulting in the ball leaving the bat with a greater speed (which means more homeruns). 

 

I think this has the potential to change the game significantly. 

 

 

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Posted (edited)

Still one piece of wood?  Moving mass to the handle means less material at the barrel. So is the entire diameter of the barrel smaller, or is the barrel length reduced?  Do they look like softball bats or is the difference less noticeable?

Edited by Pato del Muerto
Posted (edited)

They changed the shape of the bat to shift it's center of mass towards the handle.  Still the same weight and length, but you can swing it faster.

Edited by kevwun
Posted

It's a pretty significant change to the bat design. Manfred loves offense, so I could see him approving this league wide to increase the activity in games. Either way, the League needs to make a definitive ruling on it, because there are plenty of players who would use it if they knew it was an option.

This could be a very interesting development in the game, as older players tend to lose bat speed this bat design could be used to help them maintain their hitting capability and extend their careers longer.  I read somewhere that Stanton used it last year and had the fastest swing in the league and was 9 MPH faster than the average MLB swing. A 10-15% faster swing speed is a significant change that could really help a lot of players stay relevant longer, and certainly some young guys can take advantage of it.    

Image

Posted
15 minutes ago, kevwun said:

They changed the shape of the bat to shift it's center of mass towards the handle.  Still the same weight and length, but you can swing it faster.

No they are swinging it the same speed but with a concentrated mass. It's a smaller sweet spot of more mass.

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Posted

Don't you still have to make contact with the ball?  

You could give Jose Siri one of these and he still is going to miss when he swings at a ball two feet outside. Same with the Yankees in 2017 when McCullers threw the curve ball after curve ball after curve ball.  Judge could have gone up there with a canoe paddle and he wasn't touching anything so I am not ready to say this changes the game quite yet until we see how pitchers counter. 

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Posted

On the Yankee broadcast yesterday, they mentioned the Analytics group noticed a group of hitters that typically hit the ball closer to the label. By doing this, their understanding was that the  “sweet spot” on the bats moved to where the batter makes the most contact.

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, PantsTent said:

No they are swinging it the same speed but with a concentrated mass. It's a smaller sweet spot of more mass.

No, it lets them swing faster.  It upped Stanton's swing speed along with everyone else who's using it.  The sweet spot is also fatter, but the bat is more balanced instead of having so much of the weight towards the end and that lets it be swung faster.

Edited by kevwun
Posted

As a golfer, it never made sense to me to have so much mass at the end of the bat where no one ever really hits it. By moving the cg closer to the hands, a higher ss can be achieved with the same weight bat... And you also have more mass where a batter actually makes contact. 

Posted
5 hours ago, High Plains Drifter said:

 

https://www.espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/44477141/mlb-2025-torpedo-bowling-pin-bats-new-york-yankees-taking-baseball

 

From a purely physics standpoint, this is pretty interesting. Hitters gonna love it, pitchers gonna hate it. 

Article does a shitty job of explaining the science. My best attempt at an 8th grade explanation: 

Assuming the mass and length of the bat aren't changed, moving mass closer to the handle makes the bat easier to swing, (meaning you can swing the bat with a higher velocity). Which has two effects: 

1. You can get the bat around quicker, making it easier to hit fastballs.

2. Bat hits the ball with more kinetic energy (bat has same mass, but more rotational velocity), resulting in the ball leaving the bat with a greater speed (which means more homeruns). 

 

I think this has the potential to change the game significantly. 

 

 

image.gif.04c16b0466433a030fa5577b13a8b3f5.gif

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Posted
6 hours ago, Beau Vine said:

Yall need to learn about Heinie Groh...

 

1380730481000-Heinie-GrohUSE.jpg

What about Hall of Famer Nellie Fox and his "bottle bat" he made famous.

Sold at Auction: 1961 Topps Nellie Fox #477 HOF

His bat wasn't for power though. In his last few seasons in MLB, he helped Joe Morgan become a power hitter.

Since little Nellie Fox thrived on singles and doubles, he couldn’t care less about whip action. He wanted to extend his bat’s “sweet spot” from the barrel as far down as possible, even to his knuckles if necessary, so if a pitcher fooled him with a slider or curve, or jammed him with a fastball, the part of the bat striking the ball was still thick enough to propel the ball through the infield for a hit.

 

1959 season

[edit]

Fox's best season came in 1959, when he received the AL Most Valuable Player award (not until Dustin Pedroia in 2008 would another American League second baseman receive such an honor) on a White Sox team that won its first AL pennant in 40 years. He batted .306, had an on-base percentage of .380, and led the AL in singles. He also started and had four hits in two All-Star games and won his second Gold Glove. The Al López-managed White Sox had the best record in baseball, going 94-60 to finish five games ahead of the Cleveland Indians and a surprising 15 ahead of the New York Yankees. It was one of just two seasons the Yankees did not win the pennant between 19491964.

In the World Series, Fox batted a team-high .375 with three doubles, but the Sox lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in six games. In Game 5, Fox scored the only run when Sherm Lollar hit into a double play in the fourth inning (this was only the second time that a World Series game did not have an RBI). It was Fox's only postseason experience, and the White Sox did not make it back to the World Series until they swept the 2005 World Series from the Houston Astros.

Later career

[edit]

Fox played his final two seasons (1964–65) with the Houston Colt .45s and Astros. Joe Morgan later said that he looked up to Fox's example as a rookie with the Astros; Fox and Morgan were both diminutive second basemen. Morgan grew up hitting with a Nellie Fox model bat, which had a large barrel and large handle. With the Astros, Fox convinced Morgan to switch to a bat with a thin handle to leverage his power.[7]

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Posted
7 hours ago, High Plains Drifter said:

2. Bat hits the ball with more kinetic energy (bat has same mass, but more rotational velocity), resulting in the ball leaving the bat with a greater speed (which means more homeruns). 

Mass moment of inertia is what you are alluding to, and for equal mass it's lower when that mass is biased inward.  No free lunch.

I think the advantage is mostly related to the ball hitting the heaviest part of the bat.

Posted
2 minutes ago, jimmyjazz said:

Mass moment of inertia is what you are alluding to, and for equal mass it's lower when that mass is biased inward.  No free lunch.

I think the advantage is mostly related to the ball hitting the heaviest part of the bat.

 

right.. Krot is dependent on moment of inertia, not mass.

Its been a while. 

8th grade fail. 

 

Posted
9 hours ago, Dutchrudder said:

It's a pretty significant change to the bat design. Manfred loves offense, so I could see him approving this league wide to increase the activity in games. Either way, the League needs to make a definitive ruling on it, because there are plenty of players who would use it if they knew it was an option.

This could be a very interesting development in the game, as older players tend to lose bat speed this bat design could be used to help them maintain their hitting capability and extend their careers longer.  I read somewhere that Stanton used it last year and had the fastest swing in the league and was 9 MPH faster than the average MLB swing. A 10-15% faster swing speed is a significant change that could really help a lot of players stay relevant longer, and certainly some young guys can take advantage of it.    

Image

MLB already said that the bats are legal, as long as they conform to the weight and length guidelines.

All of the bats that have been tested do conform to those standards.

What I find interesting is that, in a sport that has always been about getting an edge any way you can, nobody figured this out over the last 125 years, until now.

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Posted
14 hours ago, PGFrog said:

Don't you still have to make contact with the ball?  

You could give Jose Siri one of these and he still is going to miss when he swings at a ball two feet outside. Same with the Yankees in 2017 when McCullers threw the curve ball after curve ball after curve ball.  Judge could have gone up there with a canoe paddle and he wasn't touching anything so I am not ready to say this changes the game quite yet until we see how pitchers counter. 

This is no counter to it. It fundamentally makes the bat easier to swing. The Yankees broke these out for several hitters and then scored the most runs and homers over a 3 game stretch in team history. The Brewers had no answer. 
 

Interestingly enough, Judge is not using the bat and still hit 4 homers in the opening series, another Yankee record. So one does have to wonder if this is all inflated by what could be a very shitty Brewers pitching staff.

Posted (edited)

OK… so pitch’em outside.  That’s what makes baseball great.  There is a counter move for pretty much everything.  
 

I personally don’t think it’s as much of an innovation as people are giving it credit for.  Weight distribution and shaping of bats has been an evolution throughout the history of the game.  A few years back axe handle bats were the rage.  
 

That said, if the Yankees really did believe they had gained some competitive advantage by reshaping the bats, it’s pretty fucking stupid to come out and say “this is what we did and this is why we did it.”  They should have just said “the bats comply with MLB rules” and left it at that.  

Edited by Guadaloopy
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Posted
17 minutes ago, Guadaloopy said:

OK… so pitch’em outside.  That’s what makes baseball great.  There is a counter move for pretty much everything.  
 

I personally don’t think it’s as much of an innovation as people are giving it credit for.  Weight distribution and shaping of bats has been an evolution throughout the history of the game.  A few years back axe handle bats were the rage.  
 

That said, if the Yankees really did believe they had gained some competitive advantage by reshaping the bats, it’s pretty fucking stupid to come out and say “this is what we did and this is why we did it.”  They should have just said “the bats comply with MLB rules” and left it at that.  

Looking into the numbers more, the majority of the yankee homers actually came from players not using the bats. Volpe, who was basically patient zero for the bat, hit .167 for the series (although with 2 homers). Elly De La Cruz’s big night last night in his first game with the bat made headlines but it could be just him going off because he’s really good. 
 

Basically, the biggest advantage is that you can choke up on the bat and still swing for power. But it really mostly helps players prone to hitting the ball near the label like Volpe was. Which is why players who didn’t have that problem aren’t using the bats (yet). Will be an interesting thing to track this season. 

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Posted
35 minutes ago, Guadaloopy said:

OK… so pitch’em outside.  That’s what makes baseball great.  There is a counter move for pretty much everything.  
 

I personally don’t think it’s as much of an innovation as people are giving it credit for.  Weight distribution and shaping of bats has been an evolution throughout the history of the game.  A few years back axe handle bats were the rage.  
 

That said, if the Yankees really did believe they had gained some competitive advantage by reshaping the bats, it’s pretty fucking stupid to come out and say “this is what we did and this is why we did it.”  They should have just said “the bats comply with MLB rules” and left it at that.  

You can visually see the difference in the bat shape, it’s not a great mystery. 

Posted
13 minutes ago, Dark Horse said:

You can visually see the difference in the bat shape, it’s not a great mystery. 

Easy to see the "what", but the "why" may not be as obvious.  Let everyone else figure it out for themselves.  As it stands, this particular "competitive advantage" lasted all of what... four days?

People understood that Billy Beane was doing something differently with roster construction, but they didn't have the math behind it.  They didn't know the "why."  People obviously saw the infield shift happening, but it took a while for people to understand the numbers and for that to overcome traditional positioning as the norm.

  

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Posted
2 minutes ago, Guadaloopy said:

Easy to see the "what", but the "why" may not be as obvious.  Let everyone else figure it out for themselves.  As it stands, this particular "competitive advantage" lasted all of what... four days?

People understood that Billy Beane was doing something differently with roster construction, but they didn't have the math behind it.  They didn't know the "why."  People obviously saw the infield shift happening, but it took a while for people to understand the numbers and for that to overcome traditional positioning as the norm.

  

You might not have gotten it. Everyone else of at least average intelligence understood what was going on after taking one look at the bat. It’s just no one knew it was within the rules until the yankee analytics guy studied the rule book and figured it out. The bat design is actually over a year old and was used last spring training. This is just the first time people used it in real games.

Posted (edited)

It's my understanding that most broken bats occur when the ball strikes too close to the handle or too close to the end of the bat.  Somewhere in between would then be "ideal".  If the mass is concentrated there, then for the same weight bat the hitter's swing speed can increase and the ball is striking the heaviest portion of the bat.  I don't think it's magic, it's physics/engineering and I am not surprised it helps.

Edited by jimmyjazz
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Posted
12 minutes ago, Helobious said:

You might not have gotten it. Everyone else of at least average intelligence understood what was going on after taking one look at the bat. It’s just no one knew it was within the rules until the yankee analytics guy studied the rule book and figured it out. The bat design is actually over a year old and was used last spring training. This is just the first time people used it in real games.

So you saw the torpedo bat and immediately knew that video and stat analysis showed that Volpe made more contact closer to the label, so they reworked the bat to move more mass to the label area?

C'mon, man.

Sure, we all saw it and could intuitively see how a change like that might affect contact, but very few people could articulate the true "why" without the underlying analysis.  

Granted, the person who did the initial analysis is with another team now, so it's not like the method is Yankee proprietary info.  But make the rest of MLB do their own analysis to figure out the "why."    

 

 

 

Posted
1 hour ago, Helobious said:

This is no counter to it. It fundamentally makes the bat easier to swing. The Yankees broke these out for several hitters and then scored the most runs and homers over a 3 game stretch in team history. The Brewers had no answer. 
 

Interestingly enough, Judge is not using the bat and still hit 4 homers in the opening series, another Yankee record. So one does have to wonder if this is all inflated by what could be a very shitty Brewers pitching staff.

Based upon your track record of prediction we should anticipate a historic rate in the fall of batting average and home runs along with a surge in broken bats and strike outs in roughly a month or so.  

Will be very interesting to see how this plays out and I still think as much as the design will benefit the batter it still comes down to whether or not you can consistently make contact with the ball.  

Don't see Joey Gallo coming back in the league and suddenly hitting over .200 or the above mentioned Jose Siri hitting .250.  

 

Posted
15 minutes ago, Guadaloopy said:

So you saw the torpedo bat and immediately knew that video and stat analysis showed that Volpe made more contact closer to the label, so they reworked the bat to move more mass to the label area?

C'mon, man.

Sure, we all saw it and could intuitively see how a change like that might affect contact, but very few people could articulate the true "why" without the underlying analysis.  

Granted, the person who did the initial analysis is with another team now, so it's not like the method is Yankee proprietary info.  But make the rest of MLB do their own analysis to figure out the "why."    

 

 

 

I watched Volpe roll over enough grounders to third last year to know he was hitting the ball onthe label. It was easy to see the shape of his bat and know what was up. And the bats were not some big secret either, other players on other teams had them for training last season but only the Yankees had the balls to break them out for a game. 

Posted
5 minutes ago, Helobious said:

I watched Volpe roll over enough grounders to third last year to know he was hitting the ball onthe label. It was easy to see the shape of his bat and know what was up. And the bats were not some big secret either, other players on other teams had them for training last season but only the Yankees had the balls to break them out for a game. 

I'm still calling bullshit.  Five days ago you would not have been able to articulate why Volpe was swinging a torpedo bat.

But you know what... fuck me for trying to have an actual discussion with the Helo character.

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Posted
1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

It's my understanding that most broken bats occur when the ball strikes too close to the handle or too close to the end of the bat.  Somewhere in between would then be "ideal".  If the mass is concentrated there, then for the same weight bat the hitter's swing speed can increase and the ball is striking the heaviest portion of the bat.  I don't think it's magic, it's physics/engineering and I am not surprised it helps.

Why is this just happening now though?  

Posted
4 minutes ago, markstanco said:

Why is this just happening now though?  

Why was the post-it note invented when it was?  Why was the intermittent windshield wiper invented when it was?

Sometimes it just takes a creative mind to imagine improvements.  Most engineers are remarkably uncreative, and they tend to solve problems with tried and true techniques.  They are often very risk averse, and fear being wrong.  That is antithetical to developing breakthroughs -- one can't be afraid of being wrong.

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Posted
8 hours ago, Victor Lazlo said:

What I find interesting is that, in a sport that has always been about getting an edge any way you can, nobody figured this out over the last 125 years, until now.

1380730481000-Heinie-GrohUSE.jpg

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Posted

Could the same not be accomplished by choking up?  That moves the barrel closer to the hands, and makes it easier to rotate.    It just makes the bat reach two inches shorter, making swing and misses a little more likely. 

Posted
1 hour ago, jimmyjazz said:

It's my understanding that most broken bats occur when the ball strikes too close to the handle or too close to the end of the bat.  Somewhere in between would then be "ideal".  If the mass is concentrated there, then for the same weight bat the hitter's swing speed can increase and the ball is striking the heaviest portion of the bat.  I don't think it's magic, it's physics/engineering and I am not surprised it helps.

 

well physics/engineering = magic for some. 

 

 

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the entire purpose of corking a bat to make it lighter, thus easier to swing, thus increasing swing speed? The trade off with corking is the lighter the bat, the less speed the ball has after impact. Sounds like these bats give the advantage of increasing swing speed without the loss of actual mass. 

Posted
9 minutes ago, Pato del Muerto said:

Could the same not be accomplished by choking up?  That moves the barrel closer to the hands, and makes it easier to rotate.    It just makes the bat reach two inches shorter, making swing and misses a little more likely. 

You’re giving up power when you choke up. With this design you could choke up and not lose power.

Posted
6 minutes ago, High Plains Drifter said:

 

well physics/engineering = magic for some. 

 

 

Somebody correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the entire purpose of corking a bat to make it lighter, thus easier to swing, thus increasing swing speed? The trade off with corking is the lighter the bat, the less speed the ball has after impact. Sounds like these bats give the advantage of increasing swing speed without the loss of actual mass. 

Also to give the wooden bat some flex for more pop, I think. 

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