Apr 2, 2025, 11:35 AM ET
In hitting a franchise-record nine home runs on March 29, including becoming the first team in MLB history to homer on the first three pitches they saw, the New York Yankees didn’t merely torpedo the Milwaukee Brewers‘ team ERA. They bowled over the fantasy baseball landscape with the latest, greatest, “seeking a sneaky analytic advantage” trend that has been the talk of our game through the season’s first six days.
Yes, my friends, torpedo bats are all the rage.
So far, 13 different hitters have been reported to be regularly using these new bats, which are designed to bring much of the barrel closer to the label (or sweet spot) of the bat, through the entirety of the season’s opening week: Cody Bellinger, Junior Caminero, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Paul Goldschmidt, Nico Hoerner, Ryan Jeffers, Francisco Lindor, Adley Rutschman, Davis Schneider, Dansby Swanson, Jose Trevino, Anthony Volpe and Austin Wells.
The idea for these 13, and anyone else who adopts these new bats in the coming days, is that the tweak in bat construction can only help elevate a player’s quality of contact. Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton, who has posted a 99th percentile Statcast average exit velocity in five of his past seven qualified seasons and at least 96th percentile in all seven, is a widely cited example, having used the bats during the 2024 postseason while hitting seven home runs in 14 games.
Yes, the standard “small sample size” caveat applies. Still, this new-to-2025 baker’s dozen of batters has shown a marked change in offensive production so far, slugging 84 points higher this year than in 2024 (from .406 to .490), raising their average launch angle by more than three full degrees (13.7-16.9), posting a home run/fly ball percentage more than four percentage points higher (9.5%-13.9%) and averaging more than eight feet greater distance on their average fly balls hit (314.4-322.7).
Elly De La Cruz took an instant liking to his new lumber. AP
Note that those impressive numbers don’t include Monday’s outburst from Elly De La Cruz, who delivered five hard-hit (struck at greater than 95 mph) batted balls, four of which Statcast clocked at 100-plus mph. De La Cruz hit two home runs and had 11 total bases in his first game using a torpedo bat.
Fantasy managers, notorious for being quick to react, are often equally hasty to overreact to a new season’s statistical trends. Many will therefore swarm to acquire as many of these 13 hitters as possible, along with anyone who subsequently begins using a torpedo bat. Friends and fellow fantasy enthusiasts, as I’ll often say with any new-season statistical finding: Pump the brakes … at least a little bit.
A common danger with reacting to early statistical returns is to exaggerate — and often to erroneously extrapolate — a precariously small snippet of baseball results. In the case of these torpedo (or bowling-pin, or whatever you choose to call them) bats, much of the overreaction danger stems from that Yankees outburst on March 29.
The 2025 fantasy baseball season is here! Get the group together, or start a brand-new tradition.
Join or start a league for free >>
The five Yankees from the list above, responsible for five of those nine homers on Saturday and nine overall during the team’s three-game weekend sweep of the Brewers, captured most of the headlines.
Consider, however, the context of that particular day, as there was unusual weather in the New York area — temperatures ranged from 78-81 degrees throughout the game, the 15-mph winds (blowing out slightly to the right of dead-center field) represented the sixth-fastest we’ve seen in any game played thus far this season. Surely this contributed to the power outburst.
Also note that Aaron Judge and Oswald Peraza of the Yankees, as well as Brice Turang of the Brewers all homered in that Saturday game. For Judge, it was his third career three-homer game. None were using the new bats, which could potentially point more to the weather’s influence as well as Brewers starter Nestor Cortes exhibiting some of the worst stuff of his career with only a 90.6-mph average fastball velocity and the third-worst zone rate in his 87 career starts.
Take out any Yankees from our highlighted group of 13, and the numbers tell a very different tale: a .404 slugging percentage with the new bats — or two points below their 2024 number. It’s also worth pointing out that, for all the torpedo bat rage, keeping the Yankees’ March 29 returns in the sample, this group has actually combined for lower average exit velocity and hard-hit rates this year than last.
That said, the Yankee-free torpedo group has registered a 4.4% HR rate thus far, up from 3.1% in 2024, and their boosts in terms of average fly ball distance and HR/FB rate hint that these bats do present a bit of an advantage in terms of contact quality and distance. It’s absolutely fair to surmise that torpedo bats will have an impact on home run totals — and offense as a whole — even if it’s nowhere near as massive as what we witnessed in the Bronx this past weekend.
Adley Rutschman has been known to clobber a fastball, regardless of what bat he’s using. Peyton Stoike/Baltimore Orioles/Getty Images
My big takeaway, taking a rudimentary dive into the numbers — again, noting that the small sample size caveat always applies to the opening week — is that these new bats might present a boon to noted fastball hitters, and a real problem to fastball-reliant pitchers with a penchant for fly balls.
Eight of the 14 homers hit by our studied 13 came against four-seam fastballs, and the group has slugged nearly 300 points higher, delivered hard contact 5.6% more often and averaged 23.7 feet greater distance on batted balls against that pitch type this year than last. The rest of the league, by comparison, has reflected a negligible difference in all three categories against four-seamers.
Chisholm therefore stands out, as a player who has registered an actual wOBA beneath his Statcast expected wOBA in each of the past four seasons, while exhibiting an elevated launch angle since his mid-2024 trade to the Yankees (13.8 degrees, compared to 9.8 during his Miami Marlins career). Yankee Stadium, with its short right field porch, might be the ideal environment for him and, even if the torpedo bat provides him minimal scientific benefit, if it provides him a confidence boost coming off the hot start, he could vault into the 30/30 club in 2025. Chisholm, despite his checkered injury history, is a player worth targeting in trade.
Rutschman, too, has historically clobbered fastballs, slugging .541 against them including 27 of his 54 career homers. He has looked much better during spring training and in this opening week as well, after the second half of his 2024 was marred by a finger injury he suffered in late June. There’s an excellent chance that Rutschman will emerge as 2025’s universally No. 1 rated fantasy catcher.
Pick the winners and crown your NBA champion! Create A Bracket
Among those players who aren’t yet reportedly using torpedo bats, Jonathan India, Andrew Vaughn and Taylor Ward are three historic fastball mashers, with fly ball-oriented, elevated launch angle swings to potentially capitalize upon the new trend if they wish. India slugged .500-plus against fastballs in 2021-22. Vaughn has well-above-average 94.4-mph average exit velocity and a 58% hard-hit rate against four-seamers during his five-year career. Ward has hit 25 homers and slugged .502 against fastballs since the beginning of 2022. All three could be worth trade inquiries, though with no promises of course, that any will make a change in bat type.
On the pitching side, it would take a widespread implementation of torpedo bats, not to mention further extrapolation of these fastball trends, before any rash moves would be warranted in fantasy leagues. That said, in the event of the worst-case scenario for pitchers, keep in mind that names of the five pitchers who placed both among the top-40 most fastball-reliant as well as most fly ball-oriented in 2024 (minimum 100 IP): Zac Gallen, Tyler Glasnow, Ryne Nelson, Andre Pallante and Justin Steele.
