The impact of baseball’s hottest new commodity continues to reverberate throughout the sport, dominating the conversation since the season opened with a record-setting barrage of Yankees home runs. The suddenly-famous “torpedo bat” that was used by nearly half the Bronx-bombing lineup may have taken us all by surprise, but truth is, it’s been a well-kept baseball secret that goes back to at least 2022.

Back to the work of Aaron Leanhardt, the physicist with a doctorate from MIT, turned professional baseball coach whose outside the box thinking and willing locker room co-conspirators resulted in the new lumber, one in which the weight of the bat has been redistributed to essentially match the barrel’s sweet spot with the hitter’s swing. The result, which looks something like a torpedo or a bowling pin, is a simple yet remarkable feat of engineering, reflecting not only what is possible when science meets sports in new and different ways, but of the brain of the man behind it.

“You hopefully train people up to the point where they can do cutting edge research, normally that’s in science. He’s done the same thing in baseball,” said David Pritchard, MIT physicist, professor and Leanhardt’s onetime graduate advisor. “It’s not that hitting a ball with a baseball bat is something he trained for in physics, but this is not foreign to him. He understands it. Naturally he thinks about it in a scientific way. So I’m not surprised he came up with this. What is difficult is to do it in sports, where there’s a lot of tradition.

“He was not thinking, ‘Oh gee nobody ever did this so I don’t dare do this,’ MIT is supposed to be world leading research, and you only do that by doing stuff other people haven’t done yet. That’s what he learned to do, come up with a novel solution.”

Why not? Leanhardt’s road from there to here has been similarly unconventional. From an electrical engineering undergrad degree at Michigan to doctoral studies at MIT, from the classrooms he taught as a professor in Ann Arbor to the career pivot to baseball that saw him move from the independent leagues to community college to the majors, first with the Yankees and now in Miami, Leanhardt found himself in a most unexpected spotlight on Monday. Standing on the field before the Marlins game, the circle of cameras and recorders around him spoke to his sudden fame.

“It’s definitely been surreal the last couple days,” he told reporters, “but at the end of the day it’s about the batter not the bat, about the hitters and their hitting coaches and not their hitting implements. I’m happy to help them get a little better but ultimately it’s up to them to put good swings on good pitches and grind it out every day. So credit to them.”

That Leanhardt would defer praise also comes as no surprise to Pritchard, who recalled how their small group of academicians went an entire school year unaware that Leanhardt had earned MVP honors in his local baseball league. He just wasn’t one to boast about his accomplishments.

Nowadays, others are quick to pick up the slack.

“I learned about it when virtually everyone else learned about it, and my initial reaction was ‘Damn, I wish I would have thought of that,” said Maine native and noted baseball physicist Alan M. Nathan, whose decades-long career at the University of Illinois has done nothing to dim his lifelong devotion to the Red Sox. “When I look at what was done in designing this bat, somehow to me it seems so obvious, so I think, ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ And other people might be saying the same thing.”

Pritchard agreed, “Yes, that’s the reaction to a lot of good science. Why didn’t I think of that?”

Leanhardt detailed how it was the ongoing conversation with both major and minor league Yankee players that inspired his thinking, how it was their willingness to be what he called “patient zero” by trying all early iterations of the bat that eventually made its way to the field as early as last season, but only really got noticed this year. When the Yankees erupted with a record-tying 15 home runs across their first three games, the bat immediately came under scrutiny, but Major League baseball has reassured its legality by their Rule 3.02, which specifies only that bats cannot be more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part, not more than 42 inches in length and must be made from one piece of solid wood.

That it took this long for a major design change stunned both the baseball and physics sides of Nathan’s brain. “I’ve been doing this sort of work for a long time now, I never thought of this,” he said. “The general shape of a bat where you’ve got a slim handle with a knob on it and a more or less uniform barrel, that hasn’t changed in my lifetime. Until now. This is the first real significant design change for a bat that’s actually in use in major league games.”

From Leanhardt’s brain to the major league field. “All I can say is I was one of those smart guys for so long who grew up swinging one of those weird looking bats as well, and not until now that anyone has really thought about this, myself included,” he said. “Every now and then it takes a little bit of time to question what you’re doing. A couple years ago some of the hitters started questioning what they were doing and I responded to their questions.”

Tara Sullivan is a Globe columnist. She can be reached at [email protected]. Follow her @Globe_Tara.