CHESHIRE, Conn. (WTNH) — A record-tying hitting streak by the New York Yankees has some people looking at the team’s bats. A handful of players are using bats with a slightly different shape. While some are calling foul on the so-called “torpedo bats,” a company in Cheshire says it has been making them for years.

With 15 home runs in their first three games, the New York Yankees are getting a lot of attention, or rather, their bats are. Several players are using what have been dubbed “torpedo” bats. It turns out the style is not new.

“We’ve been making torpedo bats since we started,” Freddie Vargas, the CEO of Tater Baseball, explained. “We initially made this design for softball players who wanted to hit the ball long.”

Freddie and his brother Jeremiah Vargas were high school and college baseball players. They started Tater Baseball in the family garage 10 years ago. Now, they have a store and manufacturing facility in Cheshire where players come in for a “bat fitting”.

“Where, depending on where their grouping is, the grouping is where they typically hit the bat most frequently, we design bats based around their grouping,” Freddie explained.

If you’re not a baseball player, the difference can be subtle and hard to spot, but if you look at a regular bat, it is straighter, whereas a torpedo bat has a fat spot where the hitter makes the most contact.

With the Yankees’ hot start, the phone at Tater is ringing off the hook. Dozens of orders for hundreds of bats have been coming in just the past few days.

“Pretty much everyone who works here, even the guys who sand and make the bats, have been getting DMs and texts from either friends, players, I probably fielded calls until 11 o’clock last night,” Freddie Vargas said.

But some call torpedo bats cheating, giving an unfair advantage to hitters.

“I mean, there’s players that use a puck knob, a different type of handle, knobless bats,” Freddie said. “I think this is going to be hot for a couple of weeks.”

Then, he thinks, the demand for torpedos might, well, sink, which is fine because Tater makes several hundred other kinds of bats, too.