LAS VEGAS — Turns out 21 was Denny Hamlin‘s lucky number in Vegas.
After finally getting his first career victory at Las Vegas Motor Speedway on his 21st try, Hamlin is on an undeniable hot streak he just might ride all the way to his long-sought first NASCAR Cup Series championship.
Hamlin finally broke through in Vegas on Sunday night, holding off Chase Elliott and kicking off the second round of the playoffs with his second win in September.
Three weeks after Hamlin got his first victory of the season in the playoff opener at Darlington, he led 137 laps in Vegas in his Joe Gibbs Racing Toyota, including the final 39.
After a season of frustrating results and a 17-year career filled with championship near misses, Hamlin has emerged as a serious contender for the title once again. He is just 14 points behind Kyle Larson in the points standings, and he’ll have no pressure heading into the high-stakes upcoming races at Talladega and the Charlotte Roval with his ticket already punched for the third round by this Vegas victory.
“It feels so good to win in Vegas,” Hamlin said. “Last couple of times I’ve been close, but just didn’t have the right brakes. Great to hold those guys off.”
The 41-year-old veteran had struggled on this 1½-mile track for most of his career, with just two top-5finishes in his first 18 starts. He has put together three consecutive top-four finishes since then in Vegas, capped by this victory under the lights and fireworks.
“There was a point where I never thought I’d even sniff a victory here,” Hamlin said. “The team has found a setup that has worked with my driving style. The team goes to work to give me what I need to go fast.”
Elliott closed in on Hamlin in the final five laps as Hamlin’s performance appeared to decline, cutting the gap to a half-second with two laps to go, but the defending Cup Series champion couldn’t close the remaining distance, finishing second in his Hendrick Motorsports Chevrolet.
“We were really close,” Elliott said. “Just not quite close enough. Denny did a good job controlling the gap to me. I feel like we’ve been performing at a really nice level the last four or five weeks. Just haven’t had the results to show for it.”
Kyle Busch finished third on his hometown track, followed by Martin Truex Jr. and Ryan Blaney as the 12 remaining playoff drivers began the second round and the final seven races of the season. Hamlin, Busch and Truex put Joe Gibbs Racing in three of the top four spots.
“I just can’t think of a better place to win,” said Chris Gabehart, Hamlin’s crew chief. “Certainly our team has been really capable all year long. Every metric other than the win column has been astounding for our team. It’s really been our best year together thus far. You stay up front as much as we have, the wins are going to finally come. They’re coming at the right time.”
Larson won the first stage, but Hamlin took the second when Larson needed gas and pitted with eight laps to go. Larson got stuck in the midfield in the final stage while struggling with his tires.
NO DRAMA
Harvick wasn’t really in position for any payback on Elliott after the younger driver deliberately slowed Harvick at Bristol last week, ruining his chances of catching Larson. Harvick and Elliott had a vocal public disagreement after that race.
Harvick was still sore about it in Vegas, calling it “probably the maddest I’ve ever been.”
“It was like speaking to a 9-year-old,” Harvick said of his argument with Elliott. “It’s identical. It’s 100% the exact same scenario. They get hung up on one thing and you can’t speak to them about the broader picture about the whole thing works.”
LONG TIME COMING
Hamlin has made the playoffs 15 times, but he came closest to a championship in 2010. He won eight races that year and took a points lead into the season finale at Homestead, only to end up second behind Jimmie Johnson with a 14th-place race finish.
BUSCH BOYS
Kyle Busch was strong in his 600th career Cup Series start, and older brother Kurt finished eighth in his 750th career start. The Las Vegas natives have been racing this track on the far north end of Las Vegas Boulevard since it reopened as a 1½-mile oval in 1996.
Only Richard Petty made 600 starts at a younger age than Kyle Busch in NASCAR history.
BIG HIT
Joey Gase went to a hospital after a violent one-car crash 92 laps in. His left rear tire flew off the car, sending him high into the outside wall off Turn 2.
OH BABY
Chase Briscoe finished 14th after a long day for a soon-to-be father. He got to Vegas on a commercial flight about three hours before the race after staying behind in Charlotte with his wife, who is due to give birth soon. Briscoe nearly didn’t make it to Nevada at all because of a flight cancellation, but American Airlines came through with a backup plane just in time.
UP NEXT: The NASCAR Cup Series playoff race continues at Talladega next Sunday.
CINCINNATI — Using the trendy torpedo bat for the first time, Elly De La Cruz had a single, double and two home runs for a career-high seven RBIs as the Cincinnati Reds routed the Texas Rangers14-3 on Monday night.
The torpedo model — a striking design in which wood is moved lower down the barrel after the label and shapes the end a little like a bowling pin — became the talk of Major League Baseball over the weekend, especially after some of the New York Yankees used the model in a resounding sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers.
Aaron Leanhardt, a former physics professor at the University of Michigan who is being credited with the design, says “it’s about the batter, not the bat,” though, and Reds first-year manager Terry Francona agrees.
“I think it’s more the player than the bat,” Francona said of De La Cruz, Cincinnati’s No. 3 hitter. “I said that before the game, and I still do.”
De La Cruz spoke with reporters after the win and was asked about his bat choice, and whether the 3-0 Yankees influenced his decision.
“No,” he said. “It was because of, ‘How’s it feel like?'” And then when asked if he’d use it again, he looked down at the podium and laughed.
It was that kind of night for the Reds, a much-needed effort for a club that dropped two of three games to the San Francisco Giants in the opening series of the season. Brady Singer pitched seven scoreless innings in his Cincinnati debut, and the Reds batted around in the sixth to double their lead to 12-0. And it all started with Matt McLain, who missed the 2024 season because of a shoulder injury. He hit his third home run of the season to give Cincinnati a 2-0 lead in the first.
The 14 runs were Cincinnati’s most since a 19-2 victory over St. Louis on Sept. 29, 2023.
“It’s impressive,” Francona said of McLain. “Because it’s cold out there. But I thought it was good for our whole ballclub. Let them get loose a little bit and have some fun.”
McLain and De La Cruz are viewed as an infusion of youth for a club that believes it can compete in the National League Central. The kind of talent that brought Francona out of retirement.
“Yes,” Francona said when asked if Monday was the type of De La Cruz performance he could marvel at. “And I know I’m on the late show on that.”
And though it’s quite early, De La Cruz is hitting .438 with 6 runs, 8 RBIs and 1 stolen base.
“I’m more in control, like more mature,” De La Cruz said of the start to his season. “I feel like I’m more in control, on defense and offense.”
Texas rookie Kumar Rocker struggled against the Reds, allowing six earned runs in three innings for Rangers, who opened with three wins in a four-game series versus the Boston Red Sox. Jake Burger hit his first home run for the Rangers in the ninth.
Cincinnati first baseman Christian Encarnacion-Strand was hit by a pitch on the wrist in the sixth. He stayed in the dugout for the seventh, and after the win, Francona said he was day-to-day.
WEST SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Chicago Cubs catcher Carson Kelly hit for the cycle against the Athletics on Monday night — and even walked twice, too.
Kelly homered in the fourth inning, had a two-run single in the fifth, doubled and walked in the sixth, and tripled in the eighth. He became the first Cubs player to hit for the cycle since Mark Grace on May 9, 1993, against the Padres — before Kelly was even born in 1994.
According to ESPN Research, Kelly is the first player with a cycle in the month of March, and just the 17th catcher with a cycle in MLB history. The last one from a backstop was on June 12, 2023, when J.T. Realmuto of the Philadelphia Phillies accomplished the feat.
From a team perspective, no catcher for the Cubs had registered a cycle since Randy Hundley did so on Aug. 11, 1966, against the Houston Astros.
Kelly, who made the score 17-3 with his RBI triple, and the Cubs diffused all the buzz surrounding the Athletics’ home opener in their minor league ballpark. The visitors pounded out 21 hits on Athletics pitchers en route to cruising to an 18-3 victory.
The Chicago Cubs, who already have been to Japan and Arizona before this trip, took the Athletics’ opener in stride, and after a 2-4 start, they were ready to play winning baseball.
“It’s a normal road trip, it just feels a little different,” Cubs first baseman Justin Turner said. “Obviously, opening up here, being the first ever major league game in Sacramento is something, I guess, I don’t know if it’s a good thing or a bad thing but we’re here. Looking forward to going out and playing some good baseball.”
EARLY IN THE 2023 season, Aaron Leanhardt started asking New York Yankees hitters what they needed to perform better. He was a minor league hitting coordinator for the team, and with league-wide batting average the previous year at its lowest point in more than a half-century, Leanhardt approached that spring with a specific question: How, in an era ruled by pitching, could offense keep up?
“Players were frustrated by the fact that pitching had gotten so good,” Leanhardt said.
An MIT-educated physics professor at the University of Michigan for seven years, Leanhardt left academia for athletics specifically to solve these sorts of problems. And as he spoke with more players, the framework of a solution began to reveal itself. With strikeouts at an all-time high, hitters wanted to counter that by making more contact. And the easiest way to do so, Leanhardt surmised, was to increase the size of the barrel on their bat.
Elongating the barrel — the fat part of the bat that generates the hardest and most contact — sounded great in theory. Doing so in practice, though, would increase the weight of the bat and slow down swing speed, negating the gains a larger sweet spot would provide.
Leanhardt started to consider the problem in a different way. Imagine, he told players, every bat has a wood budget — a specific amount of weight (usually 31 or 32 ounces) to be distributed over a specific length. How could they invest a disproportionate amount of that budget on the barrel without throwing off the remainder of the implement?
The answer led to what could be the most consequential development in bat technology since a generation ago when players forsook ash bats for maple. The creation of the bowling pin bat (also known as the torpedo bat) optimizes the most important tool in baseball by redistributing weight from the end of the bat toward the area 6 to 7 inches below its tip, where major league players typically strike the ball. Doing so takes an apparatus that for generations has looked the same and gives it a fun-house-mirror makeover, with the fat part of the bat more toward the handle and the end tapering toward a smaller diameter, like a bowling pin.
The bat had its big debut over the weekend, as the Yankees tied a major league record with 15 home runs over their first three games. Nine of those came from five Yankees who adopted the bowling pin style: Jazz Chisholm Jr. (three), Anthony Volpe (two), Austin Wells (two), Cody Bellinger (one) and Paul Goldschmidt (one). The hullaballoo over the bats started almost immediately after Yankees announcer Michael Kay noted their shape on the broadcast, and by the end of the weekend players around the league were inquiring to bat manufacturers about getting their hands on one.
The Yankees’ barrage of long balls permeated beyond players’ fascination and into the zeitgeist. Some fans and even opposing players wailed fruitlessly about the legality of the bats — Brewers reliever Trevor Megill called the bats “like something used in slow-pitch softball” after watching his teammates surrender home run after home run over the weekend. But the bats abide by Major League Baseball’s collectively bargained bat specifications for shape (round and smooth), barrel size (no larger than 2.61 inches in diameter) and length (a maximum of 42 inches). Most also didn’t realize that the bowling pin bat was used for some of the most consequential hits of 2024 thanks to one of its earliest adaptors.
Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton is owed as much credit as any player for the bowling pin revolution. Leanhardt’s logic behind the bat’s geometry made sense to Stanton, whose average bat velocity of 81.2 mph last year was nearly 3 mph ahead of the second-fastest swinger and more than 9 mph quicker than the average MLB swing. Even with outlier metrics, Stanton gladly embraced a bat that could make his dangerous swing even better — and used it while pummeling seven home runs in 14 postseason games.
TO UNDERSTAND HOW the bowling pin bat works is a lesson in physics. Take a sledgehammer and a broom handle. The sledgehammer will be more difficult to swing because much of its weight is distributed to the tip. The broom handle, meanwhile, can be swung with immense speed but doesn’t contain significant mass. If the length and weight of bats are constants, the distribution of mass is the variable — and Leanhardt conceived of a bat that optimizes both so it can do the most damage.
“This bat is just trying to say: What if we put the mass where the ball is going to hit so that we have an optimized equation of mass and velocity?” said Scott Drake, the president of PFS-TECO, a Wisconsin-based wood products laboratory that inspects all MLB bats to ensure they’re within the regulations. “You’re trying to take a sweet spot and put more mass with that.
“Wood is highly variable,” he added, “and everything is a trade-off.”
In the case of the bowling pin bat, it’s a trade-off hitters using it are willing to make. Because so much of the mass is in the barrel, swings that don’t connect on it produce results often more feeble than those of traditionally tapered models. As Leanhardt said, though, if a ball off the end of a bowling pin shape leaves the bat with an exit velocity of 70 mph compared to 71 mph for the traditional one, both are likely to result in outs. The difference between a 101 mph batted ball and 102 can be a flyout versus a home run.
“That’s the question of the whole wood budget,” said Leanhardt, who left the Yankees after serving as a major league analyst during the 2024 season and currently is the major league field coordinator for the Miami Marlins. “Every penny counts. The fact of the matter is you want your barrels to count the most. You want the most bang for your buck there.”
Turning those principles into reality took buy-in from the entire bat supply chain. Once players bought into Leanhardt’s seedling of an idea, they requested samples from bat manufacturers. Leanhardt worked with a number of MLB’s 41 approved bat makers to make the idea real, and the spec bats were given model numbers that start with BP for bowling pin, though he admits that “torpedo sounds kind of cooler.”
Figuring out the right balance took time. Bowling pin bats take precision to produce. Every fraction of an ounce in bat manufacturing matters. Bats are measured not only on a standard scale but via pendulum-swing tests. The more balanced a bat, the more it oscillates. Traditional bats, their weight distributed disproportionately toward the end, didn’t go back and forth nearly as much.
With relatively lenient regulations from the league allowing manufacturers leeway to create products as long as they stay within the regulations, the new — and perhaps better — mousetrap was born. Stanton’s success was the ultimate proof of concept, and manufacturers came to spring training this year with bowling pin models for players to try in games.
“There’s new pitches getting invented every year,” said Minnesota Twins catcher Ryan Jeffers, who used a bowling pin model in the first three games this year and went 1-for-8. “We’re just swinging the same broomstick we’ve swung for the last 100 years.”
Well, similar at least. Playing in an era when the average fastball velocity was an estimated 10 mph slower than the current average of around 95 mph, Babe Ruth swung a 36-inch, 44-ounce bat. As pitch velocity increased in the decades since, players shaved ounces off bats — tools to ensure they had the requisite speed to catch up with pitches.
“The bat is such a unique tool,” Jeffers said. “You look at the history of the game, and they used to swing telephone poles. Now you try to optimize it, and it feels like some branches are starting to fall for us on the hitting side of things.”
Jeffers, who has spent countless time searching for ways to counterbalance the technological revolution that helped create a generation of pitchers with the best stuff ever seen, swung a bowling pin model from manufacturer B45 in batting practice one day this spring and proceeded to order a batch that arrived during the final two weeks of spring training. Around the same time, Chisholm received his new bowling pin bats and was struck by how he couldn’t tell the difference from his traditional model.
“I mean, it still felt like my bat,” Chisholm told reporters Sunday, echoing Jeffers’ sentiment that bowling pin varieties swing similarly to their standard counterparts. “I hit the ball at the barrel, feel comfortable in the box. I don’t know what else to tell you. I don’t know the science of it, I’m just playing baseball.”
The science is multifold. Beyond the potential increases in exit velocity from the increased mass in the barrel, the weight distribution toward the knob should promote faster swings. Among the five Yankees who have used the bat, all have seen bat-velocity increases year over year, with Volpe up more than 3 mph, Bellinger up 2.5, Wells 2, Chisholm 1.1 and Goldschmidt — an inveterate tinkerer who has also used bats with hockey-puck-shaped knobs — 0.3 mph.
“Credit to any of the players who were willing to listen to me, because it’s crazy,” Leanhardt said. “Listening to me describe it is sometimes even crazier. It’s a long-running project, and I’m happy for the guys that bought into it.”
Because the data — on bat velocity as well as effectiveness — is of such a limited sample, nobody is yet proclaiming that the bowling pin bat will unquestionably revolutionize the game. But more bowling pins will be showing up in major league games soon. Leanhardt said his new team, the Marlins, will feature players using the bat in games. Tampa Bay Rays third baseman Junior Caminero laced an RBI single Sunday with a bowling pin model. In addition to the Yankees and Marlins, the Chicago Cubs and Baltimore Orioles are seen throughout the industry as the teams that have invested the most time and money researching bat geometry and optimization.
One player who does not plan on using the bowling pin model said multiple teammates plan to at least try one in batting practice after the Yankees’ nine-homer outburst Saturday. How many eventually adopt it as their full-time piece depends on feel as much as success. Comfort with a bat is vital for it to go from BP to a big league game, and in a sport where advantages don’t stay secret very long, New York’s might wind up lasting all of one weekend.
“There’s going to be a lot more teams wanting to swing them,” Jeffers said, “because of what the Yankees did this weekend.”