During the second game of the 2025 baseball season, the New York Yankees hit nine home runs—six times their normal average per game! Some think the players’ use of torpedo bats might have given them an edge at the plate.
Standard bats have their mass—the amount of matter an object contains—evenly distributed along their barrel. But a torpedo bat’s mass is concentrated in the middle of its barrel, near the “sweet spot” where batters try to connect with the ball. “The more mass there is behind that collision, the harder that ball is going to get hit,” says Alan Nathan, a retired physicist who studies baseball. Despite its impressive performance so far, it’s unclear if the torpedo bat actually leads to better hitting. “We need more data to know,” says Nathan.