‘Wood is wood’: WSU research finds Yankees’ viral ‘torpedo’ bats perform the same as traditional bats

The New York Yankees just cruised through Seattle and won two out of three games against the Mariners. On the other side of Washington state, the Bronx Bombers’ “torpedo bats” were being scientifically scrutinized.

In what Washington State University is calling the first-ever laboratory experiments on the new baseball bat design, researchers found that torpedo bats and traditional bats basically perform the same.

It didn’t look that way last season, when the Yankees hit a franchise-record nine home runs in a game against the Milwaukee Brewers and drew viral attention to the bats that they were swinging.

The torpedo bat design relies on a slightly different shape in which wood is removed from the barrel tip and added to the bat’s sweet spot, so that the diameter tapers down, a little like a bowling pin. But the hype appears overblown.

“Wood is wood,” Lloyd Smith, a professor in WSU’s School of Mechanical and Materials Engineering and director of the university’s Sports Science Laboratory, told WSU Insider. “When it comes to baseball, there’s not a lot you can do with wood. If your goal is to keep the game steady and consistent and not have a lot of change, wood bats are good.”

Smith is part of a research team that includes Alan Nathan from University of Illinois and Daniel Russell from Penn State University. They’ll present their findings at the upcoming International Sports Engineering Association conference, June 1–4 in Pullman, Wash.

According to WSU Insider, the researchers created two maple bats that were duplicates of a standard Major League Baseball bat. Two additional maple bats were made with a torpedo-shaped barrel that gave them the same swing weight as the standard bat. They measured how much energy the bat returns to the ball by firing baseballs from an air cannon at a stationary bat and using light gates and cameras to measure the speed of the incoming and rebounding ball.

The team found nearly identical performance for the torpedo and standard bats except that the sweet spot for the torpedo bat was a half inch farther from the bat tip than the standard bat.

“It was actually pretty phenomenal how close they were,” said Smith.

While some Yankees players said last year that any little tweak could provide an advantage, the team’s captain wasn’t convinced.

Aaron Judge hit an American League-record 62 homers in 2022, 58 in an MVP season in 2024 and 53 as repeat MVP in 2025. He had three homers using a traditional bat in that much-talked-about rout of the Brewers.

“The past couple of seasons kind of speak for itself,” Judge told ESPN last May. “Why try to change something?”