Aaron Leanhardt, the former Michigan physics professor who got his PhD at MIT and was part of the Yankees organization for six-and-a-half years, had a simple question he was trying to answer when coming up with the idea for the new torpedo-shaped bats five of the team’s players are using this season.
“Where are you trying to hit the ball?” Leanhardt told The Athletic on Sunday. “Where are you trying to make contact?”
The 48-year-old, who joined the Yankees as a minor league hitting coach in 2018 and joined the Marlins this year as a field coordinator, saw batting averages plummeting and strikeouts skyrocketing and in 2022 tried to figure out how hitters can respond to the ever-improving science of pitching.
Enter the torpedo bat, in which more of the wood is distributed to where a hitter most often makes contact with the baseball, which for them is lower than the end of the bat.
And as long as the bats fall within MLB regulations — no more than 2.61 inches in diameter and 42 inches in length — they are legal.
“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, who was brought up from the minors to be an MLB analyst last season, told The Athletic.
Leanhardt told the website it was a group effort when asked if he invented the torpedo bats.
The five Yankees currently using them are Cody Bellinger, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Paul Goldschmidt, Anthony Volpe and Austin Wells.
Aaron Leanhardt (l.) worked for the Yankees for more than six years. Charles Wenzelberg / New York Post
Those five players combined went 18-for-56 with nine home runs during the Yankees’ sweep of the Brewers to open the season.
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“They’re going to point to a location on the bat that is probably six or seven inches down from the tip of the bat,” Leanhardt told The Athletic regarding his talks with players. “That’s where the sweet spot typically is. It’s just through those conversations where you think to yourself, why don’t we exchange how much wood we’re putting on the tip versus how much we’re putting in the sweet spot? That’s the original concept right there. Just try to take all that excess weight and try to put it where you’re trying to hit the ball and then in exchange try to take the thinner diameter that used to be at the sweet spot and put that on the tip.”
Is there any downside to using the torpedo bat? Leanhardt doesn’t think so.
“The bat speed should stay the same,” he told The Athletic. “Maybe the bat speed can even increase a little bit depending on how you want to redesign the bat. But ultimately you’re getting a fatter barrel, a heavier barrel at the sweet spot. So in some sense, you can have your cake and eat it here too. You can get some gains without actually making sacrifices.”
