According to the lore of Major League Baseball (MLB), in 1919 Babe Ruth hit the longest homer run ever recorded—purportedly 575 feet, but probably closer to 540 feet. See the bat he used, which sold in 2003 for over $56 thousand, at this auction site. Notice the clean lines.
In the early days of baseball, batters preferred bats made from hickory and oak due to their durability. But when Babe Ruth played, ash became the preferred choice for its lighter weight, allowing for increased bat speed and power. In 1998, the MLB approved maple, which despite its heaviness and propensity to shatter catastrophically, is now used by nearly all players, in part due to ash becoming very scarce due to invasive insects.*
Now attention to bats has shifted to their shape. The New York Yankees set the baseball world on fire by using “torpedo bats” in game 2 of their 2025 season to hit 9 home runs—a notable exception being Aaron Judge (AJ) who hit 3 of the home runs with a conventional Chandler model AJ99 (aka the “gavel”, ha ha).
Developed by an MIT PhD physicist—Aaron Leanhardt, torpedo bats push their barrel closer to the player’s hands, thus providing a better chance of hitting the ball on the sweet spot. They look like an elongated bowling pin, not elegant like the bats I saw being turned out at the Louisville Slugger factory a few years ago.
So far as I’m concerned the ‘jury remains out’ on torpedo bats, especially given the counteracting results by the Judge (see my pun there?). I will be watching for statistical evidence based on a representative and sufficiently sized sample.
Stay tuned!
PS: By the way, baseball bats, specifically their shapes, cannot be patented because they fall within the rules of the game, making them ineligible for protection. That opens up the market for bat-makers to feed the frenzy for torpedo bats, for example Louisville Slugger’s Pro Prime Pink model TPD1. Wow!