Marlins' Aaron Leanhardt, creator of the 'torpedo bat,' discusses how idea came about
Aaron Leanhardt, one of the designers of the torpedo bat, speaks in Miami on Monday, March 31, 2025. Credit: Newsday/Tim Healey
MIAMI — At the plate early this season, Francisco Lindor has been ready to fire away.
Lindor used a so-called “torpedo bat” during the Mets’ season-opening series against the Astros, manager Carlos Mendoza said. And after the funky-looking bats transformed from industry novelty to super-trendy curiosity — exploding into the general consciousness of the baseball-watching public when the Yankees hit a bunch of home runs with them over the weekend — Lindor might not be alone for long.
Juan Soto, Brett Baty and Tyrone Taylor are among the other Mets who have expressed an open-mindedness to giving it a try.
“It’s a topic in the big leagues right now,” Mendoza said. “Every team, every player continues to look for an edge and find ways to improve in the margins. This is a perfect example.
“I’m pretty sure guys will continue to at least test it. This is not something you can grab it and go try it in a game. You got to get a feel for it and see what it’s like. We’ll see how it goes.”
The torpedo bats draw that name from their shape. Instead of the bat getting steadily wider from the handle through the tip, the weight is shifted more toward the middle, creating almost a rectangular shape for basically the top half of the bat.
As the Yankees’ Jazz Chisholm Jr. said on social media Monday: “You just move the wood from the parts you don’t use to the parts you do.”
Marlins field coordinator Aaron Leanhardt said: “That’s actually a really, really accurate description of it. Very short and to the point.”
Leanhardt, who has a Ph.D. in physics from MIT and used to teach physics at the University of Michigan, is an expert on the subject. He helped develop the first such bats with the Yankees, for whom he worked as a minor-league hitting coach and analyst before getting hired by the Marlins this past offseason.
According to Leanhardt, this project has been in the works for more than two years — since the 2022-23 offseason — and some Yankees major-leaguers and minor-leaguers dabbled with torpedo bats in games as early as 2023.
“I think the eureka moment was when players pointed to where they were trying to hit the ball,” Leanhardt said. “They noticed themselves that it was not the fattest part of the bat. They noticed themselves that the tip was the fattest part of the bat.
“Then everyone just looks at each other like, well, let’s flip it around. It’s going to look silly, but are we willing to go with it? At the end of the day, we found guys who were willing to go with it. That was really the moment.
“Really, it’s a credit to the players who had the conversation with me two years ago and were willing to be Patient Zero and to demo the first versions of this.”
It took time, though, for the concept to catch on.
“It takes time for guys to get comfortable with it, time for guys to tweak the designs to their liking,” Leanhardt said. “These guys have very dialed-in swings and they’re very in tune with their own equipment. If version 0.0 is good but not good enough for them, we try version 1.0, 2.0.
“Honestly, I don’t even know what version we’re on right now. But that’s the reality at the highest level: It takes maybe that long to go through that many iterations.”
In the Bronx, Chisholm, Anthony Volpe, Paul Goldschmidt, Cody Bellinger and Austin Wells have taken to using the bats.
“It’s another bat. It’s just a different shape. It’s the same thing,” Soto said. “Guys are using them for years. The Yankees are using them now, everybody wants to talk about it.”
And yet . . .
“I’m going to ask them,” Soto said of his former Yankees teammates. “I have teammates last year that asked [if he wanted to try it]. It’s never caught my attention, but yeah, I would try it.”
Hitters can be awfully finicky about the style of bat they use. And plainly identifiable variations have been common for years, though more so for variety in the handles — the ax bat, the hockey-puck nob — than for anything involving the barrel or meat of the bat.
“At the end of the day, it’s about the batter,” Leanhardt said, “not the bat.”
Tim Healey is the Mets beat writer for Newsday. Born on Long Island and raised in Connecticut, Tim has previously worked for the South Florida Sun Sentinel, the Boston Globe and MLB.com. He is also the author of “Hometown Hardball,” a book about minor league baseball in the northeast.
