The topic isn’t a new one for Twins assistant hitting coach Trevor Amicone, who spent five seasons working on the Yankees player development staff.

“What’s new is not that people are using them. It’s that people are noticing it,” Amicone said Monday. “They’ve been used last year. The players that have been noticed are not the only ones that have been using them for about a year now.”

Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers heard about the bats during spring training and he’s using them in the regular season. They conform to Major League Baseball’s size requirements for bats, but it looks like a bowling pin because the elongated barrel is shifted 6 inches closer to the handle.

Aaron Leanhardt, a former Yankees minor league hitting coordinator and analyst who has a background as a physics professor, is credited with the innovation.

“I will tell you that room for the last five years in the Yankees minor league hitting department was a room where nothing was considered crazy,” Amicone said. “We were willing to try a lot of different things to see what worked. … Aaron proved what he needed, and we saw the results at the minor league level.”

Amicone doesn’t try to sway any players to use the “torpedo bats” — some bat companies introduced them to major league hitters at spring training — but he’s available to answer questions. Some past bat innovations created big headlines, like a hockey puck-styled knob a few years ago, but they proved to be more of a fad.

“I don’t think it’s going to be something that’s an end-all, be-all for everybody, that everybody’s going to start swinging these bats and become better hitters,” Jeffers said. “I think this might work for some people and might not for others. For me, I’m giving it a little bit of a trial period to see how I like it.”