What Are Torpedo Bats and Why Is Every MLB Fan Talking About Them?

The phrase “torpedo bats” was not in anyone’s vernacular last week. But now that phrase has been living rent-free in baseball fans’ minds ever since Opening Day of the 2025 MLB season.

Whether you’re a baseball aficionado or not, you know what the shape of a bat is. The tapered wood that widens at the top where the barrel forms is something we all know. It’s been that way since America’s favorite pastime was created.

Now, though, an MIT physicist has altered all of our perceptions with the creation of these torpedo bats. The bats, which look exactly how they sound, see the thickest part of the bat replicate that of a torpedo.

This creates a larger spot on the bat for players to take advantage of when trying to hit the ball that’s coming at them.

Are Torpedo Bats Legal?

The controversy around these new bats took center stage over the weekend after the New York Yankees slugged a tremendous amount of home runs in their first series, including nine of them in a 20-9 win on Saturday that felt more like a football game than that of a baseball contest.

As a result, discussions of whether or not these things should be legal (they are, apparently) have arisen.

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In all honesty, it was a perfect storm (or is it imperfect?) that led to this discourse. The most recognizable team in the sport had a historic stretch of games where it was discovered that about half of the players were using a new bat that the general public had never heard of. It was ripe for controversy.

As Trevor Plouffe best summed it up on Jomboy Media’s “Baseball Today” podcast, “You’re reading too far into what this bat can actually do. It’s not some fucking Fortnite epic gun that kills everyone. It’s not a one-shotter, bro.”

There’s a belief that this oddly-shaped piece of equipment is illegally designed so that anyone who hits the ball, talent be damned, the ball will automatically travel further than they would with a standard Louisville Slugger.

That’s just not the case. Players have tried these out in the past and no one blinked an eye. The torpedo bats comply with all of MLB’s rules on bats, including landing in the criteria (as stated in Rule 3.02) that the barrel can not be bigger than 2.61 inches and the bat itself can not extend past 42 inches. All of that applies to these goofy-looking torpedo bats.

So let’s drop the nonsense about this being the equivalent of steroids in baseball. Hitting a baseball remains the hardest thing to do in all of sports. That’s become even more true over the years with the advancements in analytics that have heavily aided pitchers, making it even more difficult for batters to find an advantage.

If some guys find better luck with these torpedo bats, let them have at it.