WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. —Take a closer look at Dansby Swanson’s game bat, and the curvature starts to look a little odd.
While the bat he swung last year — and continues to use in batting practice — follows a traditional shape, this one tapers at the end.
Swanson is in the growing legion of players who have adopted the torpedo bat, made famous this past weekend by the Yankees.
“They’ve obviously put a lot of work and research into it, and I think that what throws people off is it’s not what a standard baseball bat for hundreds of years has looked like,” Swanson said in a conversation with the Sun-Times Monday. “But it’s just a different way of looking at it. I mean, it’s pretty cool just to see people be innovative and trying to do whatever they can to be a good player and be a good team. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
The game’s rules agree. The bats are perfectly legal, falling within parameters that limit the diameter, length and size of the cupped indentation at the end of the bat.
They became a hot-button topic through a perfect storm. The prevalence among the Yankees, large-market news generators, paired with the team’s 15 home runs in three games lit and stoked the fire.
Not to mention, the bats just look funny. And funny plays on social media.
The attention also revealed that the trend was neither brand new nor unique.
The Cubs started the introduction process of reverse-tapered bats last season, making prototypes available for their hitters to see and try out. Then they had a more in-depth presentation over the offseason.
“Our baseball sciences department did an awesome job of analyzing these and figuring out what the benefit could be,” hitting coach Dustin Kelly said. “It’s always hard when you have major leaguers that have been using the same bats for a long time. So we knew that it would need to be pretty buttoned up, and make sure that we had all the right information, and tested them, and did a lot of the due diligence to put them in front of them.”
In addition to Swanson, Nico Hoerner has been swinging a torpedo bat in games. Ian Happ swung one during the Tokyo Series. Other players have tried them in batting practice.
“The Cubs have given me great data on where I’ve hit the most balls on the bat and where I’ve hit the most balls on the bat at productive angles,” Hoerner said, describing heat maps along the image of the barrel of a bat. “You want to maximize where you are doing that most often. And for me, there’s stuff all over the barrel, but there is a little bit more on the side closer to the label than to the end with my profile – which isn’t necessarily true for everybody.”
While torpedo bats are not for everyone, there may be advantages regardless of the hitter’s most frequent contact point.
“The mass of the barrel being a little bit closer just weights it towards the hand a little more,” Kelly said. “And that’s what we’re learning, is every guy is different, and everybody feels the bat different, and the benefits for one guy are not going to be for the next.”
Bats are already highly personalized. Major-league players work with their bat company of choice to design a tool to their own set of specifications – going beyond just length, width and type of wood.
The emergence of this different shape opens another avenue to cater the bat to the player’s swing.
“It’s optimizing where the sweet spot of the bat is,” Kelly said. “We don’t have a ton of data outside of what we’ve used in the cage. So, over the next year, once there’s a lot more in-game data, you’ll probably see a lot more people using them and trying to figure out what is the best use for them.”
Swanson, who is notably routine-oriented even in a sport that emphasizes routine, started toying around with a torpedo bat this past offseason. In the spring he committed to using it once a game.
“I think the data is pretty helpful, that typically because of the way it’s shaped and where the mass is at on the bat, it helps you hit the ball just a little bit harder,” Swanson said. “The harder you hit it, typically, the better chance you have of getting a base hit. So, that, I think actually means something.”