Unless you’ve been totally unplugged from baseball news until right now, you’ve definitely heard about the new craze/controversy sweeping the league: the torpedo bat. Yankees Jazz Chisholm, Cody Bellinger, Paul Goldschmidt, Anthony Volpe, and Austin Wells forced them into headlines on Opening Weekend, when the Yankees steamrolled the Brewers 20-9 with nine homers for New York (including one for each of the five already mentioned).
The new bat is MIT-designed and isn’t new; they concept was introduced as a “bowling pin bat” in 2021, they appeared at spring training, they’ve made their way to the minors, Francisco Lindor used one through his 2024 season, and Giancarlo Stanton used one in the postseason last year.
There’s a relatively straightforward philosophy to the torpedo bat: more lumber is shifted toward the center of the barrel. MLB has already confirmed that it’s legal and more players have started to experiment with it around the league.
A few Tigers players were asked whether or not fans should expect to see them using the bats anytime soon. Spencer Torkelson, Kerry Carpenter, and Riley Greene all said they hadn’t ordered one, with Carpenter and Greene referencing Aaron Judge’s response to the same question: “What I did the past couple of seasons speaks for itself. Why try to change something if you have something that’s working?”
There was one hold-out, however: Ryan Kreidler said he’ll “definitely think about getting one.”
Tigers’ Kerry Carpenter had a resounding ‘no’ on chances of using a torpedo bat, but Ryan Kreidler was intrigued
Although the bats have been ruled as legal, there’ll be no shortage of complaints about them from fans, many of whom (especially Yankees antis) have already slapped a cheater-adjacent label on players who have been using them. The Brewers suffered another rout at the Yankees’ hands in the series finale, losing 12-3, but it easily could’ve been that the Brewers’ pitching is just awful; they lost 11-1 to the Royals just a few days later.
Shortcut or not, Judge’s comment has some resonance — he hit nearly 60 home runs last season without using one — but not every player is or could ever be Aaron Judge.
While Greene did admit that he was intrigued by it, Carpenter, arguably the Tigers’ best power hitter against righties, seemed pretty firm on keeping things they way they’ve been. He hit his first two homers of the season during the Tigers’ Home Opener against the White Sox, so he might be correct in thinking that his approach doesn’t need fixing.
