After hitting a franchise-record nine home runs in the Yankees‘ 20-9 clobbering against the Brewers, plenty of noise was made surrounding a soundbite from the game. The YES Broadcast honed in on the abnormal shape of the bats being used by the Bronx Bombers. This observation went viral due to the unprecedented home run barrage from a lineup that fans were ready to fire Aaron Boone over just minutes before the first pitch.
One of the first questions immediately raised on social media was whether it was even legal for the Yankees to have abnormal barrels on their bats, leading to a spread misinformation about these bats. Some questioned whether Michael Kay let the cat out of the bag, opening the door for other teams to copy the Yankees and take away their advantage.
Here’s the thing; while it might be innovative to have team scientists do it instead of a bat company, bat fitting and the concept of changing weight distribution isn’t new. Not only is it not new, but the protocols MLB has in place to prevent foul play have been in place for years as well. The Yankees didn’t reinvent the wheel, nor did they break MLB regulations, but they have gotten players bought in on bat changes that have immediately paid off in their batted ball quality.
The Legality of the Yankees’ Remarkable New Barrels
Anthony Volpe already has two home runs this season and is one of the players with an abnormal barrel, as team analysts deduced that they should shift the weight of his bat to better match his most common points of contact. It seems completely illegal to just move the barrel, but it’s actually completely legal to do it and players have done this for years. Jasson Dominguez did his bat fitting externally, as Marucci has developed labs designed to track swings and develop the perfect bat for optimizing damage contact.
Cody Bellinger did the same thing this past winter with Louisville Slugger, and other players across the league have either talked about or been filmed during their bat-fitting process. Kevin Smith, a New York native, former first-round pick, and member of the Yankees’ organization during the 2024 season posted on Twitter about the Yankees’ former data analyst Aaron Leanhardt invented the torpedo barrel, bringing more mass to wherever your most frequent contact point on the bat was.
If the Yankees didn’t hit nine home runs, the conversation about its legality likely doesn’t become a hot-button issue, but since they did, here’s MLB Rule 3.02:
(a) The bat shall be a smooth, round stick not more than 2.61 inches in diameter at the thickest part and not more than 42 inches in length. The bat shall be one piece of solid wood.
NOTE: No laminated or experimental bats shall be used in a professional game (either championship season or exhibition games) until the manufacturer has secured approval from the Rules Committee of his design and methods of manufacture.
This is via an official MLB Rulebook from the 2021 season, with zero evidence to suggest that Rule 3.02 was altered in the time since. The Yankees would not be able to make such alterations without the Rules Committee clearing it up, and while it’s certainly not concrete evidence, the lack of any complaints from the Brewers is pretty damning as well. Not a single pitcher, player, or coach uttered even a hint that they suspected foul play, you would think someone would look at a bat they’ve never seen before during the nine home run trots and raise some flags.
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These bats are legal, but are they unique only to the Yankees? Michael Kay delved into the process of how the Yankees were able to optimize Anthony Volpe’s bat for his swing path but after the dust settled on a historic offensive day, some in the fanbase were wondering why the long-time broadcaster would ever reveal such sensitive information. If you’re hoping for the Yankees to either get a patent on this or keep it under wraps for the rest of the season, well the cat was likely out of the bag before today.
Not only do other players already do things such as fit their bat for their swing, but the analyst who invented the Torpedo bat has already been hired by the Marlins. The wave of coaches hired away from the Yankees’ organization for greater roles in places with more upward mobility at the moment included Aaron Leanhardt, and if you think he hasn’t already told his new employer all about this, I’ve got a bridge to sell you. A lot of what made this topic sweep through social media is because they hit nine home runs, not because these bats are new in the industry.
So, do these bats just not matter? Are nerds just overanalyzing swings instead of playing the games on the field and using their eyes? Well, for the players who have confirmed to get their bats fitted, there have been some pretty significant batted ball improvements that stem back to Spring Training.
Cody Bellinger got his bat fitted, as he revealed to Gary Phillips of the New York Daily News towards the tail-end of Spring Training, and throughout the Grapefruit League, he was hammering the baseball. His Average Exit Velocity, 90th Percentile Exit Velocity, and Max Exit Velocity were improved from his 2023 season, and yesterday we saw another new PR for the left-handed outfielder. Bellinger launched a 451-foot home run that the Hawkeye system at Yankee Stadium originally didn’t capture, with it later being updated for the public to view.
He has never hit a ball this far in his career and hasn’t hit a ball > 440 feet since 2019 when he won NL MVP and had the best year of his career. Does that matter? The more we keep seeing the batted ball results, the more I become somewhat convinced that there’s something to these gains. This isn’t entirely because of his bat, he discussed mechanical improvements with Gary Phillips as well, but I’d be shocked if they didn’t have any effect on his early-season power surge.
Anthony Volpe already has two home runs on the season and crushed the baseball throughout Spring Training, with his subpar results causing fans to ignore those underlying improvements. We have seen Volpe have good results in the Grapefruit League and still lay a dud, and last year he teased us for the first two months of the season before a harsh slump. This time there could be some real changes; his bat speed has jumped up since the postseason and with it has come an approach more suited to do damage on contact in the air.
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These kinds of improvements are extremely encouraging, especially considering they could result in an Anthony Volpe who hits 20+ home runs again. The bar for his bat shouldn’t be extremely high because he’s an elite defender at a premium position with tons of baserunning value, if he’s a 95 wRC+ hitter he could put up a near 5 WAR season. That’s just how good he is at everything that isn’t hitting, and it’s why I have consistently defended the value he does provide while acknowledging the seemingly untapped potential at the plate.
Ben Rice and Austin Wells also saw significant improvements in swing speed this Spring Training, but is that all about their bats or is there more to it? Whatever it is, James Rowson and the Yankees’ hitting staff are getting roster-wide improvements in their batted ball data, with those performance indicators having perhaps the most important effect on whether a player will get a hit or not when they make contact. That’s the storyline you follow; the Yankees have often either been trendsetters or one of the first through the door on the pitching side, but hitting is a different story.
At the Minor League level, they’ve had the buy-in to take lesser-known prospects and turn them into hot commodities at the trade deadline, with Benjamin Cowles being their most recent example. Agustin Ramirez is one of the hardest-hitting prospects in baseball, and yet he wasn’t even a top 100 prospect entering 2024, with the Yankees getting him to make some key tweaks before he became a coveted prospect that brought them Jazz Chisholm. Those principles just haven’t clicked at the big-league level, but if they’ve finally cracked that code, we could be in for a fun ride.
It’s too early to know for certain, but the Yankees hired James Rowson to help reach players, he has not altered their organizational philosophy of hitting the ball hard. Maybe this hiring is the one that finally gets their hit-strikes-hard approach across to their hitters at the Major League level, or maybe they just used all of their home run magic in one game and the clock is about to strike 12 on some of these hitters.