NEW YORK — To Yankees shortstop Anthony Volpe, using the “Torpedo” bat design is a no-brainer. He “bought in,” giving the new-look barrel a shot. “So far, so good,” Volpe told reporters in front of his locker in the Yankees’ clubhouse on Sunday morning.
“The bigger you can have the barrel where you’re going to hit the ball makes sense to me.” The bats went viral on social media during the Yankees’ historic nine-homer barrage on Saturday , a bombardment of the Brewers that featured long balls from Volpe, Cody Bellinger and Jazz Chisholm Jr., who are all using their own models with the thicker barrel.
“I think the benefit for me is I like the weight distribution personally,” Bellinger said. “The weight’s closer to my hands, so I feel as if it’s lighter in a way. So that for me was the biggest benefit.
And then obviously the bigger the sweet spot, the bigger the margin for error.” As ex-Yankees infielder Kevin Smith noted in an enlightening thread on X/Twitter on Saturday, Aaron Leanhardt — who served as the Yankees’ MLB analyst last season — is the brainchild behind the bat. Leanhardt, a former MIT physicist, is now the Marlins’ field coordinator.
“It’s just about making the bat as heavy and as fat as possible in the area where you’re trying to do damage on the baseball,” Leanhardt told Brendan Kuty of The Athletic on Sunday. The bats may look abnormal and perhaps even illegal at first glance, but they’re not breaking any ru.
