Phil Mattingly breaks down the science behind 'torpedo' bats

(CNN) — Despite losing their first game of the MLB season, the New York Yankees continued their historic start to the year as they broke multiple records through their prolific home run hitting.

In the Yankees’ 7-5 home loss to the Arizona Diamondbacks, the team went deep three times – one each for Jasson Domínguez, Anthony Volpe and Ben Rice – to reach 18 through the first four games of the 2025 season.

The mark broke the MLB record for the most homers a team has hit through the opening four games of a season, breaking the previous record of 16 set by the 2006 Detroit Tigers.

According to the Yankees’ website, which cites Stats Perform, the team also became the first in MLB history to have nine players hit home runs in the team’s first four games and the first to have three players hit at least three in the opening four games: Volpe, Aaron Judge and Jazz Chisholm Jr.

In that span, the Yankees have scored 41 runs which is second-most in franchise history through four games, trailing only their 48 runs racked up in 1950.

Despite the record-breaking evening, it wasn’t enough for the Bronx Bombers on the night.

“It’s a long season, so it’s alright, but it’s definitely disappointing,” Yankees pitcher Mark Leiter Jr. said afterwards, per the Yankees website. “We had a chance to win that game, and I’ve got to make better pitches right there.”

‘Somebody should have invented this decades ago’

The Yankees have been one of the main beneficiaries of the “torpedo” bats which have sparked so much conversation through the opening of the new season.

“Torpedo” bats, so called because their shape resembles a torpedo, were developed by former MIT physicist and current Miami Marlins staffer Aaron “Lenny” Leanhardt when he was an analyst in the Yankees organization. The thinking, he told the Athletic, is to make the bat “as heavy and as fat as possible” in the spot where players are most often making contact with the ball.

The Yankees analytics department looked at every player’s hitting data so that the widest part of the bat – or the barrel – could be placed where they most often hit the ball and adjusted each player’s individual bat accordingly.

Only a handful of Yankees players are currently using the “torpedo” bats, with Volpe and Chisholm Jr. enjoying red-hot starts as a result, while Judge is also off to a great start with his standard bat.

The success of the “torpedo” has been the biggest talking point of the early 2025 MLB season, but for astrophysicist Neil Degrasse Tyson, he’s surprised it’s taken this long.

“I’m wondering: ‘Somebody should have invented this decades ago’ because, in retrospect, it looks quite simple,” Tyson – who describes himself as a baseball fan and an “authentic” Yankees fan having been born in the Bronx – told CNN’s Boris Sanchez and Brianna Keilar.

Tyson brought a Nerf bat to the interview to explain why the “torpedo” bats have been so revolutionary. He highlighted the thickest part of the bat running from the top down through the majority of the Nerf bat’s barrel which allows “you to hit it at almost any part of this bat and get maximal ‘wood’ behind it.”

But, conversely in the “torpedo” bat, Tyson explains that by targeting a specific “sweet spot” and making the part of the bat where players typically hit the ball wider, bat developers “aren’t wasting wood in parts of the bat where I’m not making contact with the ball.”

“(Also), if I move the center of mass of the bat closer to my hands, two things happen: I can actually swing the bat faster and I have more control over the bat,” Tyson explained. “It’s not that different from back in the days when they used to choke up on the bat (by) bringing your hands closer to the center of mass and the ball.

“Many of the batters who choked up had very high precision with how and when they hit. But regardless, if you’re a slugger and you put the mass closer in, I will not only be able to swing faster and if I make contact with the widest part, then I will be able to put more concentrated mass from the bat behind the ball, you should have higher exit speed off of the bat when that happens. And any time you have higher speed off the bat, the ball’s going to go farther.”

The development of the new form of bats has led to questions over whether they fit within MLB’s current guidelines and if they’ll become commonplace.

And Tyson is firmly in the camp of letting new innovations remain.

“You want to stay in the rules and the rules don’t say where you put the thick part of your bat. It gives a rule for how much it weighs, for how long it is, it’s supposed to be rolled out of one piece of wood,” the 66-year-old said. “And so they’d have to come up with a rule to make it illegal and, personally, that would be stupid. Well, not stupid, everyone has access to this bat.

“It would be something different. If it was some secret formula and nobody else had it, then that would be unfair – plus Judge hit four home runs and didn’t use the bat. You’ve still got to know how to hit home runs. You still have to be good at that.

“But I will add that so many other advances in sports have made it much more interesting to watch. Diet, exercise, weight training, distance training, all the physiology that we have altered, enhanced over the decades, that’s in the human body. I don’t see why if we can improve the action on the field with the equipment that’s used that we shouldn’t do that as well.”

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