Neil deGrasse Tyson's take on 'torpedo bats' misses one key detail

Neil DeGrasse Tyson became the latest to weigh in on the "torpedo bat" craze that took off Saturday, when the Yankees used the newly designed bats to set a team record with nine home runs against the Milwaukee Brewers.

The astrophysicist, a proud Yankee fan himself, spoke at length to CNN about the physics of the bat design.

Michael Kay explains that the Yankees made new bats "where they moved a lot of the wood into the label so the harder part of the bat is going to strike the ball."

Seems relevant today... pic.twitter.com/cpldzigdrT
— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) March 29, 2025

The so-called "torpedo bats" concentrate the weight closer to the handle than the end of the barrel compared to a traditional bat. Four Yankees used them in Saturday's win: Cody Bellinger, Paul Goldschmidt, Anthony Volpe and Jazz Chisholm.

Aaron Leanhardt, currently the Miami Marlins' field coordinator, is credited with helping develop the bat design. A university physics professor, he left academia for baseball and joined the Yankees' staff in 2018.

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Leanhardt told The Athletic's Brendan Kuty that the industry kind of caught wind of it last year, and "it exploded in the offseason."

What took so long? That's what Tyson wants to know.

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“I’m wondering: ‘Somebody should have invented this decades ago’ because, in retrospect, it looks quite simple,” he told CNN’s Boris Sanchez and Brianna Keilar.

Turns out, somebody did conceive of this decades ago.

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Stanford physicist Paul Kirkpatrick is most famously known as the co-inventor of an x-ray reflection microscope for examination of living cells. In 1963, he contributed an article to the American Journal of Physics called "Batting the Ball." In it, he wrote:

"What one might do is to place the mass where it will do the most good, and the familiar shape of the bat shows some progress in this direction, though not nearly so much as is evident in the golf driver. The mass should be where the collision is to occur. The so-called "bottle bat" once affected by sluggers was a step in just the wrong direction."
- Paul Kirkpatrick

Leave it to a physicist to be ahead of the curve (figuratively and perhaps literally, in this case).

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Neil deGrasse Tyson wonders why 'torpedo bats' weren't conceived of sooner (spoiler: they were)

By J.P. Hoornstra | Apr 2, 2025