What happened to the torpedo bats that nearly broke baseball last spring

MLB fans are asking again in May 2026 whether torpedo bats are still around, almost 14 months after the New York Yankees helped turn a legal bat design into one of baseball’s loudest equipment debates.

Yes. They are still legal, some players still use them, and they have settled in without reshaping the game the way some feared.

The conversation around them has cooled. What looked like a sport-altering trend in March 2025 now reads as a specialized tool that helps certain hitters.

Torpedo bats are still here

The question has come back because the noise around them went quiet. They were discussed like they might ruin baseball early last year, then faded from broadcasts by the end of 2025 and into 2026.

The bat was treated like a crisis when the Yankees opened 2025 with a barrage against the Milwaukee Brewers. The league has spent the past year without chasing a runaway equipment problem.

MLB’s position has stayed straightforward. The bats comply with existing equipment rules as long as they remain a smooth, round, one-piece wooden bat, no more than 2.61 inches in diameter and 42 inches in length.

The rules do not require the thickest part of the barrel to sit in one fixed place. That leaves room for a torpedo shape, with more mass moved toward the area a hitter is most likely to make contact.

The Yankees and Brewers series made the story explode

The frenzy began with one weekend. The Yankees opened the 2025 season by sweeping the Brewers and outscoring Milwaukee 36-14.

The flashpoint came on March 29, 2025, when New York beat Milwaukee 20-9 and hit nine home runs. Across the series, the Yankees hit 15 homers, and the unusual bat shape became the easiest explanation.

Aaron Judge did not use a torpedo bat, yet he was central to the Yankees’ early power surge. The Brewers also pitched poorly during that opening series, so the bat shape was only one strand of why the baseballs were leaving the park.

What torpedo bats actually do

The torpedo bat is a reshaping of the same legal wood budget. The design has been credited to Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT-educated physicist who worked in baseball analytics, and the idea is to move the bat’s thickest mass closer to the part of the barrel where a particular hitter most often makes contact.

Traditional bats carry more of their barrel mass toward the end. Torpedo bats create a more bulbous shape lower down the barrel and taper more sharply toward the tip.

That can help a hitter who frequently makes contact slightly closer to the hands, and it can create a penalty when contact drifts toward the thinner end of the bat. Physics analysis has framed the effect as player-specific, because the redistributed mass only helps when it matches how the hitter actually strikes the ball.

Some players still use them

The design spread beyond one clubhouse. Anthony Volpe, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Austin Wells, Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt were among Yankees linked to it during the early surge.

Other reported users or experimenters have included Elly De La Cruz, Jose Trevino, Adley Rutschman, Davis Schneider, Ryan Jeffers, Junior Caminero, Nico Hoerner, Dansby Swanson and Francisco Lindor.

Once more players tried the design, the game stayed recognizable. Some hitters found a reason to test it, while others stayed with traditional models because their contact profile did not call for a different shape.

The data has not backed up the doomsday version

Washington State University research found that torpedo bats work as well as regular bats rather than clearly outperforming them. That tracks with what the league has seen since the Yankees’ opening weekend, where the bats helped certain hitters optimize contact without producing a universal power surge.

So the answer is simple. Torpedo bats are still around. They are legal, they are no longer new, and the evidence never gave baseball a reason to ban them.