The History of the Baseball bat seems a bit mirky but it appears to have really began in the 1840’s when players would just grab a spoke from a wagon wheel and fashion it.
Phoenix Bats had probably the best description I could find in a quick Google search:
In the 1840’s, decades before governing bodies and bat manufacturers, players had to fashion their own sticks.
During the early days of baseball, players used whatever scrap wood they could get their hands on. Most used their own hand tools to transform an old ax handle or wagon wheel spoke into a “striker’s stick”. Soon, the majority of players were fashioning their bats solely from wagon tongue wood……Soon, players began to realize that rounder bats provided a better point of contact than flat bats. For the next twenty years, as baseball began to build momentum across the country, players would experiment with all kinds of bat shapes and sizes, but one thing would remain constant: round bats were here to stay.
It seems fitting that New York, with its claim as the home state of the start of baseball (1840s somewhere in New York) is the center of the opening week of Major League Baseball and perhaps the biggest innovation to hit the game in decades. It seems like this design has been there, or would have been obvious but it was just under the surface only for the Marlins field coordinator to unearth it. Of course Aaron Leanhardt as we learned this week is a former MIT physicist who just happens to be the Marlins Field coordinator.
The 48-year-old Leanhardt earned a bachelor’s degree in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan and a doctorate in physics from MIT. During his time at the latter, he was part of a NASA-funded research study in which scientists cooled a sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded. Leanhardt later served as a physics professor at the University of Michigan (2007-14).
…..“I think the eureka moment, really, was when players pointed to where they were trying to hit the ball, and they noticed themselves that that was not the fattest part of the bat,” Leanhardt said. “They noticed themselves that the tip was the fattest part of the bat, and then everyone just looked at each other like, ‘Well, let’s flip it around. It’s going to look silly, but are we willing to go with it?’”
Leanhardt began as a college baseball assistant coach at New Jersey’s Atlantic Collegiate Baseball League in 2017. He later got hired by the Yankees. That was huge in the history of baseball. Good move Yankees.
The Yankees worked with a Pennsylvania company Victus Sports to create the actual Torpedo bat design, but it looks like Louisville Slugger is actually getting into the action.
For the company behind the bats, the King on Prussia-based Victus Sports, the bats might just be the most exciting thing they’ve seen in the game since they were founded.
“The torpedo bat, obviously everyone is hearing about it now, so, for us, it’s been the most exciting thing, really, that’s happened in baseball bats in the last 15 years, since we started,” said Jared Smith, founder of Victus Sports.
Smith — whose company was also behind the stylish bats that looked like pencils and other designs — said the torpedo bats aren’t new. But, his company spent over a year working with teams like the New York Yankees and the Baltimore Orioles to bring the torpedo design to the MLB.
Yahoo Sports now has a running list of players who are now using Torpedo Bats
The first torpedo has hit Philadelphia pic.twitter.com/p68jR9bc11
— IcyVert (@IcyVert) March 31, 2025