The biggest story in sports right now may not be the NCAA Tournament, NFL free agency, or even the upcoming Masters tournament. Instead, Major League Baseball has stolen the early April headlines thanks to the craze about the torpedo bats of the New York Yankees and all the home runs they have hit so far this season.
In case you somehow have not heard yet of the viral craze, the Yankees have been using these torpedo bats that move more mass into the barrel of the bat in hopes of the batter making better and more powerful contact. In golf club terminology, it’s what we’ve seen with drivers over the years increasing the size of the sweet spot and allowing hitters to hit the ball farther.
The torpedo bats have led to immediate success as the Yankees pounded the Brewers over the weekend, even hitting 9 home runs in one game. And now other players around baseball like Elly de la Cruz are trying them out and also seeing immediate results.
It’s gotten so crazy that DraftKings now has a tab for home run props that feature players that are likely to use the torpedo bats during their games.
Usually the house tries to take every minute advantage they can get when it comes to trying to get one over on sports bettors. So you have to wonder if these odds are pre-juiced given the power that these juiced bats seem to have at the moment. DraftKings even made note of the torpedo bats in a tweet with a meme posted to their social media page.
Major League Baseball has to be in dreamland about all the talk and coverage that the torpedo bats are generating. Some good old fashioned modern engineering and MIT research is a way better story for a modern day home run boom than the specter of living through another steroid era. But the lasting question over all of these home runs is that in over 150 years of baseball, nobody thought of this before now?