Dansby Swanson May Have Ditched Torpedo Bat Following Early Hype
This probably isn’t something I’d bother covering if the Cubs were playing a game today, but they’re not and my obsessive nerdery must be catered to. After going viral due to the Yankees’ nine-homer explosion early in the season, the torpedo bat’s hype appears to be sinking. The fact that it’s been around since last season and hadn’t already caught on more broadly is telling in and of itself, but increased focus on it means we’re getting more actual and anecdotal information about it.
I’ve been saying from the start that its value is based almost solely on personal preference, as it’s more about changing a bat’s moment of inertia (MOI, otherwise known as swing weight) than anything else. While the overall mass remains the same between torpedo and traditional, they feel different due to the distribution of that mass. There’s also the idea that shifting mass from the end of the bat down to the sweet spot or label could result in less effective mishits and possibly even altered swing paths.
That’s why I’ve been saying from the start that it makes sense for Aaron Judge to stick with the 35-inch, 33-ounce club he’s used for years now. He’s so big and strong that he can generate elite bat speed with a heavier implement, thus creating a great deal more energy than the average hitter. He doesn’t need tremendous barrel accuracy, he needs more margin for error.
Someone like Nico Hoerner, on the other hand, has well below-average bat speed with tremendous barrel accuracy and might benefit from the torpedo’s funky barrel. However, the early results tell us he may not be experiencing any boost at all. Though his batting average is up to .302, his .058 ISO, .360 slugging percentage and 102 wRC+ indicate that he’s still only slightly above league average in terms of run creation. In his case, the torpedo bat’s impact appears to be negligible at best.
“I keep hearing the same fallacy being sort of shared widely, ” Keenan Long of LongBall Labs told MLB Now. “And the fallacy I’m hearing is that the mass at the end of the barrel is not productive in the collision with the ball, and therefore the mass shouldn’t be there. And this universal claim that it’s good to take away mass from the barrel end of the bat. So I wanna be clear that that is not true in the physics.”
After getting out to a hot start, Dansby Swanson‘s production fell off a cliff as his hard-hit rate failed to translate to actual hits. That was largely a function of a sharp increase in launch angle and fly balls, indicating that his bat path had gotten steeper. While I’d typically associate that with dumping the barrel due to the bat being more end-loaded, getting lighter could have adverse effects as well. Some of the reactions to my piece on that topic chided me for blaming bad luck for his increased whiff rate, but that kind of missed the point.
It is entirely possible, however, that a change in his swing path led to more swings and misses along with the changes in his contact profile. There appeared to have been a lot more feast or famine, with too much of the latter to be mitigated by the former. That may have led Swanson to switch back to his old bat, something CI’s Blake Cowell noticed during Wednesday’s win over the Dodgers in which Swanson collected a pair of singles.
It may just be a matter of coincidence because Swanson probably didn’t read my article and we don’t yet know when he swapped bats, but his batted-ball profile appears to have shifted. Out of 12 balls in play since April 18, five had positive launch angles below his career average of 13 degrees. By contrast, you have to go back 51 batted-ball events — all the way to March 29 — to find five with launch angles between 0 and 13. That could be some combination of intent and implement, or it could be just a fluke.
While we need more data to make anything close to a definitive statement about Swanson’s performance, it’s becoming clearer all the time that the torpedo bats are not some sort of cheat code. One of my favorite YouTube channels is The Baseball Bat Bros, where Will Taylor and a rotating cast of characters — often including his brother, John, hence “bros” — test all manner of bats across various levels, materials, and even eras.
Taylor, a former D1 player, has an exceptional feel for equipment and does a great job of explaining how and why a given bat works. Or doesn’t. He has now produced two videos with different torpedo models, the first of which yielded nearly identical results as a standard model.
“I can pretty firmly conclude this got pretty popular because it looks crazy and a few of the New York Yankees happened to have really good games, and they could benefit from a lower swing weight at that time,” Taylor said after testing the torpedo. “And since it looked really cool, and there were some cool pictures of it, this bat went crazy viral. That one-tenth of an inch of barrel diameter down toward the hands, in my opinion, does not do much.”
A more recent video featured an extreme “Ultra Torpedo” model from Louisville Slugger that produced what Taylor said was the lightest-swinging wood bat he’s ever used.
“The torpedo bat isn’t meant to just be a turn model that you can swap in in place of your regular wood bat,” Taylor explained after his latest test. “The original design for this was a bat-fitting device, where, over thousands of swings, analytics guys can tell you…’Let’s either shorten your bat up or move the sweet spot a little more down towards the hands…’
“There is a reason only see, I think, not even 20 guys — 15, 16, 17 guys* in all of Major League Baseball swinging the torpedo bat. Because it really doesn’t do much performance-wise. It’s good for bat fitting, it’s good for weight distribution, but it is not like it makes the bat hotter. It really just kinda makes it act shorter.”
As Taylor also noted in the video, the real benefit of a torpedo bat might be that it circumvents the frequent obstacle of a player’s ego getting in the way of them going with a shorter, lighter bat. If they can keep the same knob/handle turn with the same length and weight they’re used to, shifting mass toward the handle is a way to essentially trick a hitter into using a bat that is better suited to his swing.
Just like launch angle and exit velocity are just ways to quantify Ted Williams‘ decades-old advice to hit the ball hard in the air, the torpedo is a way to replicate what Williams did later in his career when he wasn’t able to hit it through the shift as easily. The Splendid Splinter opted for a heavier bat early in the season, thus forcing himself to go backside more often, then switched to a lighter model once teams adjusted and played him straight-up. I’m wondering if perhaps Justin Turner could benefit from reducing his swing weight in light of his tumbling bat speed.
Barring a marked change in my fixation with bats and swing data, you can expect to see more on this topic over the coming days and weeks.
Ed. note: Per that Bat Bros video, the following players have been confirmed as using torpedo bats. Ian Happ also tried one in Tokyo and didn’t like it. Pete Crow-Armstrong swung one toward the end of last year and appeared to have been using one earlier this season, but I haven’t noticed him using it lately.
Jazz Chisholm Jr.
Austin Wells
Paul Goldschmidt
Anthony Volpe
Junior Caminero
Ryan Jeffers
Adley Rutschman
Swanson
Nico Hoerner
Davis Schneider
Elly De La Cruz
Alec Bohm
Francisco Lindor
Jose Trevino
Oliver Dunn
Carlos Correa
Cody Bellinger
Oneil Cruz
Cal Raleigh
Yandy Diaz
