‘Wood is hard’: WSU study finds Yankees ‘torpedo’ bats perform as well as traditional bats
The New York Yankees recently swept Seattle and won two of three games against the Mariners. On the other side of Washington state, the “torpedo bats” of the Bronx Bombers were being studied scientifically.
In what Washington State University is calling the first-ever lab test of a new baseball bat design, researchers found that torpedo bats and traditional bats performed similarly.
It didn’t look like that last season, when the Yankees scored a record nine runs in a game against the Milwaukee Brewers and drew the attention of the bats they were swinging.
The design of the torpedo bat relies on a slightly different scenario where wood is removed from the barrel tip and added to the sweet spot of the bat, so that the width is reduced, a bit like a bowling pin. But the hype seems to be overblown.
“Wood is wood,” said Lloyd Smith, a professor in the School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering at WSU and director of the University’s Sports Science Laboratory, told WSU Insider. “When it comes to baseball, there’s not much you can do with wood. If your goal is to keep the game stable and consistent and not have too much change, wood bats are fine.”
Smith is part of a research team that includes Alan Nathan from the University of Illinois and Daniel Russell from Penn State University. They will present their findings at the upcoming International Sports Engineering Association conference, June 1–4 in Pullman, Wash.
According to WSU Insider, researchers created two map bats that were duplicates of a standard Major League Baseball bat. The two additional maple bats were made with a torpedo-shaped barrel that gave them the same swing weight as a standard bat. They measure how much energy the bat returns to the ball by shooting a baseball from an air cannon at a stationary bat and using simple gates and cameras to measure the ball’s incoming and returning speed.
The team found almost identical performance of the torpedo and standard bats except that the sweet spot of the torpedo bat was a half inch from the tip of the bat than the standard bat.
“It was really amazing how close they were,” Smith said.
While some Yankees players said last year that any small tweak could pay off, the team captain wasn’t convinced.
Aaron Judge hit the American League record for homers in 2022, 58 in an MVP season in 2024 and 53 as a repeat MVP in 2025. He had three homers using a traditional bat in that much-talked-about battle with the Brewers.
“The last few seasons have spoken for themselves,” Judge told ESPN last May. “Why are you trying to change something?”
