MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

There’s some consensus though that currently, pitching has evolved much faster than batting due to advances like Trackman and deeper understanding of the relationship between biomechanics, pitch tunneling, spinrate/flight path/movement, and so on. In conjunction with that has been a shift towards “TTO” (three true outcomes - HR/BB/K) on the offensive side, which is a statistically motivated perspective that batting for average is suboptimal. In short, you would rather have a lower BA and a higher home run rate even if it means a higher K rate, since home runs (and 2Bs) are so significantly more valuable than singles, and fly outs are also much more valuable than ground outs (or really, less bad) due to the opportunities for sac flies and the risk of double plays. TTO tho is also partly a response to the elevated pitching capabilities - velocity and spin.

This is all just to say that batters are falling behind and there’s an argument that it hurts the on-field product from an entertainment perspective since balls in play are what we ultimately watch for - if torpedo bats make it more likely that players can bat for higher averages by barreling up the ball more consistently, it will be good for the game.

Other alternative proposals include lowering the mound (famously done in the 60s), adjusting the ball (eg lower seams, which makes it harder for pitchers to generate spin and makes the same spin rates less effective), and so on.

One good (bad?) thing is that to some extent pitchers are starting to reach a biomechanical wall, evidenced by the greatly increased rates of Tommy John surgery, though that is partly also an effect of better surgical techniques and recovery times.

Point is - it’s complicated.

I think everything you noted as a downside is why, in part, things like Pickleball and Disc Golf took off in the last 5 years.

They’re similar to things we know, but different enough that they haven’t been optimized out of reach by normals, or at least perceived as such, and both have a relatively cheap barrier of entry to get started.

I think we may find 20 years from now the dominate sports have changed up a bit. I have heard that the NFL and MLB for instance are worried about the incoming decline of their sports because they aren’t nearly as popular with people under 35 compared to basketball and other up snd coming sports

People have had similar sentiments in tennis about how racket and ball technology has changed the game over the years. Moving away from wooden rackets led to a massive increase in power and a larger sweet spot, which transformed the game from finesse to powerful serve-and-volley play. John McEnroe began with wooden racquets, while Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi adjusted to carbon fiber frames. Then poly strings took things even further, players generated extreme topspin to deliver aggressive swings with much more consistency, pushing the game back towards the high-powered baseline style.

For me, Roger Federer's style represents tennis at its most beautiful. His all-court game feels effortless and graceful, almost like a dance. But from a court-level view, it's more of a high-speed chess match built on calculated aggression, constantly pressuring opponents and waiting for the slightest opening to strike a point-winning shot. That level of sophistication and precision wouldn’t be possible without modern racket technology.

I still feel emotionally tied to classic matches from my childhood, especially Federer versus Nadal. But there's no objective reason, because tennis keeps getting better. People worried finesse was disappearing, but players like Alcaraz have brought back drop shots and clever cat-and-mouse tactics against deep-baseline defenders like Zverev and Medvedev. It’s a technique that was once considered too risky to rely on consistently.

In golf, tennis, baseball, basketball, running, & any other sport will keep evolving as technology & athleticism improves. Clinging to older styles feels more like holding onto the past than genuinely appreciating progress. If you can’t enjoy Curry hitting daggers in the Olympic finals or Kiplimo breaking 57 minutes in a half marathon, maybe the problem isn't with the sport itself. Maybe it’s the comfort of past memories holding you back from appreciating what’s happening now.

I think what both have in common is this: People who don't otherwise care about the sport will watch highlights of people smashing balls really far with sticks. And "people...will watch" generates revenue.

People who are passionate about either sport will find them less and less interesting, but 1) most of you will keep watching anyway, and 2) the sports can afford to lose you for the parts you won't watch if it increases the total amount of "seconds people will watch" enough by drawing in enough new eyeballs.

Why not invent say "Field Golf" or "Lolz Golf" or whatever you fancy calling it? Set the rules and equipment to around your ideal time. Get some mates together to give it a go and refine it.

I think the toughest part will be equipment - golf bats cost a fair bit to make but perhaps a price limit might help fix that. You could define club classes akin to how sailing has standard class boats. You could even require that participants make their own for an added twist. I'd keep the current standard balls for now.

Why stop at the bats and balls? What about the format? You could do three holes with a very short shot clock and go straight to the 19th for a bladder wrecking session involving a golf themed drinking game. Instead of running in a Triathlon, do nine holes after the swim and before cycling to the finish. You could replace the cycle phase with knocking a polo ball from a pony along the course to the finish. The swim could be ... yes ... underwater croquet!

Could be a lot of fun even if it never takes off - and that is what any past time ought to be.

amen. i hit golf balls with old hand me downs from my great uncle. the woods - the heads are wooden! they feel great to connect and they can crush distance. but the feel is so full and warm. i guess like warm vinyl records.

even better- i get to suck on so many shots. but sometimes - glory and feels.

another thing i like to celebrate when doing new sports ks starting with the crappiest gear available. it works and i learn. eventually when i upgrade, i can appreciate the new features and tech. or it’s bogus and doesn’t matter.

probably inappropriate but i find this phrase encouraging - it’s not the arrow, it’s the indian.

This simply impacts the viewers of the sport, right?

When you play, you can play with whatever equipment you want, with a like minded group of players. Keep the game as “pure” as you want or use “The Sure Thing” clubs from top golf. The changes only matter on TV and then specifically if you compare that product to years or decades back. MLB is an incredibly poor example of maintaining purity. the most sacred records in the game were totally shattered, repeatedly, with modern technology and pharmaceuticals all in order to increase TV viewership and no penalties at all. To pretend there is some preservation of purity they are keeping these guys out of the Hall of Fame for a while, but the teams didn’t have fines or lose wins or draft picks or even have any of these guys suspended when everyone knew they were cheating.

It’s this intersection between taking part and entertainment where this odd gatekeeping happens. I hated hydraulic disc brakes and EPS on race bikes, until I tried it, the stuff is great but for myself I still ride bikes without electronics and rim brakes sometimes. I pinch the barbs on my hooks when I fly fish, I know others don’t and probably catch fish that I don’t, but for me I pinch the barbs. Oddly, I find it acceptable to use completely modern lines and rods and can throw a fly way better than any angler could in years ago. I’ve been able to find more satisfaction competing against myself with my own criteria than worrying about the purity on tv.

Speaking as a curling fan: the game has been greatly enhanced by the analogous technological improvements. Shots that used to be fever dreams are now routine at top levels of play, and the sport is better off for it. The change is even more dramatic worldwide than in Canada; teams from countries like Japan and Korea (perhaps the most impressive in this regard) have had to keep up with these advances while also generally becoming competitive on the world stage - in a sport where previously (say, a few decades ago) Canada, Scotland (the birthplace of the game) and maybe a couple of European countries were the only ones worth paying attention to.

Very true. I dream to be able to hit off one of the fancy ones the players have at the facilities

FWIW they already for the most part do have bats tailored to what they like to feel in their swings as far as where weight is, where the barrel begins, what shape it is, what the grip/knob feels like. I can't say how much data goes in to deciding what is used vs what they like to feel, this feels like more of a renaissance in attempting to use data somewhere else than brilliance in design.

My intuition tells me this whole thing is stupid and a fad, sure you might get slightly more mass behind the ball on perfectly barreled swings, but you get so few of those on the year already, were they already home runs of XBH on the old bat? And what are we losing on mishits with the skinny end of barrel, since after all hitting is more than just perfect swings caught in the right spot. Seems like more of a push towards feast or famine, 3 outcome baseball, which I personally just ain't a fan of.

Every sport hits this sort of threshold where they ban optimization. Swimming did it with 'sharkskin' suits and long distance running with Nike's Alphafly and Vaporfly shoes.

Maybe that's where advanced baseball bats will end up eventually.

It could get even more wild. I could imagine batters having custom profiles for different pitchers. E.g. one bat for when hitting against someone who throws 100MPH four seam fastballs, and another when facing someone who throws 90 MPH cutters.

The problem isn't friction from the grip (that can occasionally pop up), the issue is when you hit the wrong spot and the energy of the ball gets dumped entirely into your hands instead of evenly distributed through the bat.

Padded gloves do throw off your swing / bat "feel". You do now see a lot of guys wearing a little rubber donut thing on the thumb of their top hand. That helps a lot with absorbing the vibration from a mis-hit. It still shivers your hands, but you don't get the piercing pain focused right at the base of your thumb.

[Edit] You do build up some crazy calluses swinging a bat for hours upon hours of practice. They absolutely don't help, like at all, when you strike a ball in on the handle of the bat. It always hurts.

Gloves help, calluses don’t. It’s also a lot worse in the cold.

One additional wrinkle to the tush push is that it WAS illegal until the mid-2000s. Sort of like the 3 point line in basketball, it has taken many years for a team to take advantage of the new rule to its fullest extent.

I think people generally take the perspective of "it used to be illegal, so it's reasonable to make it illegal again" in a way they don't when a team is just doing something new.

> You see something similar going on in football, right now, with a play known as the "tush push".

As a European that just woke up from a nap, I was having a very hard time imagning a soccer move called "tush push" that was so successful it had to be outlawed...

We'll see if the analogy holds. Every team has the ability to use bats like this.

If no other team sees an advantage from using torpedo bats, it would be a lot like the brotherly shove.

But first we'll have to see if this is a passing fad. In baseball, pitchers evolve pretty quickly and usually lead the batter-pitcher arms race.

I'm guessing it spread pretty quickly through the league and be used by a minority of hitters, and the advantage will flatten out. So a .210 hitter may hit .230. That is a big difference no doubt, but compare the game to when leading batters were hitting .330.

> the "tush push". It's not a particularly complex play, but for some reason the Philadelphia Eagles can pull it off astoundingly better than anyone else in the league

I looked this up and am still unclear why only the Eagles seem to be able to perform this maneuver effectively, other than having an exceptionally strong person at the front?

The have the rule where the team defending the field goal is not allowed to act like a “locomotive” to push thru and try to block the kick, which would almost certainly work because the edge blockers cannot just defend come inside to defend it.

The tush push shouldn’t be allowed because is almost impossible to defend, sort of an automatic 1 yarder once you get there. The snapping team always have advantage because they know the start timing and the defense always has to react a split second later.

Ohhh I get it now — the joke is that the Astros are crooks. Like, actual cheaters who got away with it. Hilarious stuff. Classic. (=

But seriously, they stole a World Series and faced zero real consequences. It’s like watching a gang of bank robbers walk free because the judge thought, “Well, gosh, they seemed like nice young men.”

Imagine if John Wilkes Booth had been caught, and the government just said, “Eh, let’s move on. No hard feelings.” That’s the Astros. MLB gave them a juice box and a pat on the head.

Total joke. Crooks.

https://archive.today/R20Kz

While home runs are exciting, there are limits to that. For several years the MLB has been dealing with "three true outcomes", where a large percentage of at bats end in either a strikeout, walk, or home run.

While this can be exciting for individual at bats, it becomes pretty boring if it's too common. This is because it invalidates every role except the pitcher and batter, and removes a lot of strategy from the game. While this may be fine if you only watch the occasional game, it can get really dull if you watch a lot of games every season.

Home runs are a lot of fun! One of the things that makes baseball exciting is that every pitch has the potential to result in a home run. This adds a lot of tension to the game, and helps keep things engaging. But when home runs become too prevalent, it eliminates other fun aspects of baseball, and makes the game one dimensional and dull.

For sure, that makes a lot of intuitive sense. I was thinking that there's a sweet spot with HRs. If it gets too common then it may be less of a dopamine hit. Kinda like how the randomness of slot machines is fine-tuned to maximize addictive potential.

However, one could argue the same thing about Curry and 3 pointers. My original argument suggests that seeing someone makes loads more 3 pointers would be boring. Yet it was very exciting to see him smash through previously unthinkable records. On the other hand, that was not driven by technological change…

Yes, because home runs still are not that regular of an occurrence. So they're still "special".

But if they become a lot more commonplace, then the allure will depreciate over time.

Title of the url says it all: https://old.reddit.com/r/baseball/comments/1e5mwbs/mlb_home_...

It's not about watching home runs; it's mostly about watching a competitive game.

When there was a left handed pull hitter at at the plate, the third baseman would move to where the shortstop was, the shortstop would move to second base, and the second baseman would be on shallow right field. Third base was left completely undefended. I always wondered why hitters couldn’t just practice a late swing and send a chopper down the third base line …

The new rule says there has to be two infielders on either side of of second base when the pitcher delivers They still shift just not as much

Before the shift ban, there could be 3 players on one side of 2nd base. The rule now is that there have to be two fielders on either side on 2nd when the pitch is delivered. Essentially, they changed the legal zone

So long as it's not a one sided advantage, the game will be fair and way more exciting. Even now, there's a huge difference in attending, and watching on TV, a game that is 1-0 going into the 9th inning versus a game that is 5-4 going into the 9th. Even though those are even matches at that point in the game, one of them feels painful the other has had some excitement. Good defense is not as exciting as productive offense.

That doesn't follow at all.

Imagine if, somehow, soccer players got really good at scoring goals from midfield, such that a very high proportion of goals were scored after just two touches. That's exciting or interesting for, like... one game, then it's worse than before.

Are you there to watch people score goals, or to watch people play the game?

If there's a home-run more at-bats than not, they get boring. You do want plenty of solid hits (but you also want strike-outs! And walks! And bunts! You want diversity!) but you don't want a lot of them to be homers.

A home run is only exciting if it's uncommon, otherwise it's less interesting than most other things that can happen when the ball's hit into fair territory.

> If you're a batter and can't hit the ball with the right part of the bat

But that is what they are doing? The bat is within size and volume limits. Many bats come in slightly odd shapes or weight distributions. Is it because this is "optimized" that it's bad?

Because baseball bats must all have only one size and shape? Or just not this shape?

There do exist traditionalist golf leagues that use classic club styles and balls that are way less flashy than the modern stuff.

I briefly looked into it after playing Golf Story on the Switch, which features an area where you have to use a set of historical clubs (sometimes with different names from the modern versions!) and found such leagues.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hickory_golf

With golf, there are other dimensions course designers could use to make the pro game less about distance. Tighter fairways, faster greens, etc.

The biomechanics involved are insane. You are hitting a baseball-sized object (ha) moving at 90+ mph with massive break, often very late and over two axes, with something a couple of inches in diameter, and need to make decisions and react and adjust your swing path in a handful of milliseconds. And that’s just to make contact, let alone good contact, let alone contact that can find a patch of grass.

It’s the single hardest skill in competitive team sports in my opinion.

> Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It's 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week - just one - a gorp... you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes... you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week... and you're in Yankee Stadium.

(Crash Davis)

Volpe and Chisholm have honed and fine-tuned their swings over 20 years to produce results good enough to vault them into the top few hundred in the world at that particular craft.

They have a lot riding on that existing swing. Pro baseball is an unforgiving endeavor in which small edges add up over the course of a six month season, and the rewards for skill follow a power law distribution such that being just a bit better has millions of dollars attached to it, but becoming just a bit worse can also mean losing millions of dollars.

Changing swing path to get contact on a slightly different portion of the bat on a particular kind of pitch, possibly when looking for another pitch, perhaps just in particular counts, requires a lot of offseason work and carries no guarantees. The risk is similar to a from-scratch rewrite where the old code is thrown away; a very large portion of the time the resulting hitter ends up unplayable in the majors.

Tweaking the bat shape, on the other hand, is a micro-optimization akin to a bug fix whose rollout is behind a feature flag: undoing it is as easy at pulling a different bat from the rack.

It makes more sense if you consider the baseball player as a multimillion-dollar factory that cannot be brought down for maintenance.

Basically, these guys have such fine tuned biomechanics for hitting a baseball with just a few hundred milliseconds to decide wether to swing and where to swing, that trying to change their approach to hit further down the bat might ruin their hitting if they mess up. Far easier to shift the sweet spot.

Its not that they just need to get closer to the ball, their estimation if where a ball will strike their bat is slightly off.

I wish I could find it--I think it was on the Uber engineering blog--but I remember reading a post in which they talked about choosing a less "optimal"/"efficient" implementation in order to better cater to the available hiring pool: it's cheaper and easier to throw more money at hardware, than conjure up the necessary engineering talent

That resonated with me as I turned back around and gazed at the elegant, efficient, and inscrutable-and-difficult-to-debug Reactive-Extensions-based backend I was working on. Maybe Task<List<T>> would have been "better" after all

guys already pick bats based on their height, it seems entirely reasonable everyone will do this. There probably is an optimal point to have that sweet spot at though so most hitters will probably try and stick close to it.

Why not? I'd assume similar things are already done in other sports like tennis, golf, hockey, ...

Should be easy with the analytics baseball has and could easily level up everyone making it fair. It would be interesting to see how they judge younger players though as they come through and inevitably can't afford custom bats (or can't afford new ones every time they adjust their mechanics) or don't have the analytics to make them valuable.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_World_Series