Unlikely turnarounds, keeping the faith and the enduring appeal of bad college football
JERRY KILL CONSIDERS himself something of a Mr. Fix-It for programs in need of a serious overhaul, the college football equivalent of an HGTV host who must convince an overwhelmed couple that the crumbling mess they just took out a mortgage to buy can, with a little hard work and the right crew of contractors, become a dream home. He’s renovated places like Northern Illinois and Minnesota before, and he likes the reputation.
Still, when Kill took the job of head coach at woeful New Mexico State last year, it didn’t seem like a renovation job. More like a dare.
“I had coaches tell me I was crazy,” Kill said.
The concern was well-founded. In the previous 60 years, the Aggies made it to exactly one bowl game. The budget, facilities and fan engagement were abysmal. The team was bad — going 3-9 or worse nine times since 2008 — and recruiting to New Mexico was difficult. There were plans to join Conference USA, but at the moment, New Mexico State was muddling through as an independent.
“I was told there’s no way to win there, and this was the worst program in the country,” Kill said. “I thought, ‘Hey, those are the kinds of challenges I like.'”
The funny thing is, Kill isn’t alone. In college football, perhaps more than any other sport, there’s something inexorably alluring about the truly awful. Sure, most fans wouldn’t invest their careers in restoring New Mexico State the way Kill has, but every week, thousands of them invest a few hours into watching — dare we say, enjoying? — truly bad football in the hopes of seeing a miracle unfold or, at the very least, witnessing failure in the most interesting way possible.
Call it bad football, ugly football, sickos football — whatever the name, its charm is undeniable in a way that simply isn’t true of nearly any other form of entertainment. Yes, the cultural zeitgeist might occasionally stumble upon William Hung or Right Said Fred, but those are enjoyed with a measure of ironic detachment. And sure, sports fans have their butt fumbles and, well, pretty much the entire history of the Detroit Lions, but those are as sad as they are funny.
Bad college football, however, is something akin to cult classic movies of the “so bad they’re good” variety, enjoyable on their own merits once you buy into the central conceit. Whether it’s Patrick Swayze earnestly insisting “pain don’t hurt” in “Roadhouse” or Butch Jones announcing his awful 2017 Tennessee Volunteers won the “championship of life,” the line between ridiculous and sublime is effectively nonexistent.
At its heart, the joy of watching bad college football is rooted in the same passion that drove Kill to take the New Mexico State job. For Kill, turning abject failure into something approaching coherence is actually fun. That’s more or less the same reason so many fans tune in for Tuesday night MAC-tion or Pac-12 After Dark. There’s joy in finding something awful and sticking with it long enough to see what happens next because, particularly in college football, the possibilities seem endless. And if, against all odds, something magical does happen, we can say we knew it all along.
Kill’s dream home is still in the early stages of construction, but the job has been unquestionably rewarding. Walls are starting to go up. The foundation has been laid, and he’s starting the frame. He can see the progress.
“Everybody wants to see an underdog get going,” Kill said. “And they’ll watch to see if it can be sustained. You know, it takes a little time to build a house, and we’re planning to build a big one.”
FOR CONNOISSEURS OF bad college football, 2022 has been a revelation.
Think back to the opening week of the season, when Iowa defeated South Dakota State 7-3 on the strength of a field goal, two safeties and an unwavering commitment to avoiding forward progress. It was riveting. At nearly the exact same time, North Carolina and Appalachian State combined to score 62 points in the fourth quarter of their game. Every series was more ridiculous than the last. It was can’t-miss TV because of so many can-miss tackle attempts.
We watched Texas A&M collapse under the weight of Jimbo Fisher’s playbook, Iowa punt its way into the hearts of a nation and Nebraska play so horribly the Huskers even cursed the teams who beat them. We watched TCU keep its bowl hopes alive in what amounted to a game of chicken against the play clock. And those were just the name brands who rewarded us with sicko football performance art.
On the flip side, we had some truly amazing Cinderella stories, too. Three of the four worst teams during the decade from 2012 to 2021 made a bowl this year. The worst team in four of the Power 5 leagues over the previous decade made bowls. Duke, Southern Miss, Rice, Bowling Green and Georgia Southern (combined 14-34 last year) are all in bowls, too. Tulane (2-10 last year) is playing in a New Year’s Six game. It’s been a truly incredible run from utter despair to, well, the upper end of mediocrity, at least.
So why is this all so oddly exciting?
Matthew Stohl is a professor at the University of Montana who explored the paradox of enjoying bad films in his book, “Why It’s OK to Like Bad Movies,” and he sees similar logic in the appreciation of bad football.
First, Stohl said, there’s a critical formula involved in the process, whereby the cost of production must far outweigh the cost of consumption. Movies — even the really bad ones — require a lot of resources to produce. The creators put real effort into making them, even if they turned out horribly. But watching a bad movie? That’s a mere 90 minutes of time for the viewer. It’s a low-cost form of entertainment. The same is true in college football. The games have genuine stakes for the programs involved, but for the fans, it can be a harmless guilty pleasure. If UConn wins or loses by 50, it costs the fan nothing more than a few hours of time.
The second necessary ingredient is the opportunity for chaos. This is where college football truly shines. Why does a movie so utterly incoherent as “The Room” have such a wide audience? Because every scene is somehow a non sequitur. Go back and watch the fourth quarter of that UNC-App State game. It’s the same thing — utter ridiculousness and zero continuity.
“Even the worst NFL isn’t really that bad,” Stohl said. “In college football, there’s so much more chaos and variance.”
Indeed, the best NFL team of all time (say, the 2007 New England Patriots) was only about 36 points per game better than the worst NFL team of all time (say, the 1990 Patriots). This year, Georgia was at least 36 points per game better than 18 college teams. Guys with NFL aspirations play on the same field as guys hoping to start a hedge fund in a few years. The opportunity for chaos is limitless.
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Weber State is on the wrong end of the record books as it surrenders four safeties on errant special teams snaps.
From there, Stohl said, we can split “so bad it’s good” into two categories.
The first is the point-and-laugh group, which typically sees a once-powerful figure stripped of its cache. Think of the movie “Cats,” which was based on a long-running Broadway musical, had a massive budget and an all-star cast and yet, it was horrendous. In college football parlance, it was this year’s Texas A&M team.
The second is the lovable underdog story, the misfit auteur working on a shoestring budget, trying and often failing miserably, but at least doing it in a memorable way. Think “Plan Nine From Outer Space” or UMass‘ entire FBS history.
And tying it all together is a sense of community. Why do fans line up for midnight showings of “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” or quote lines from “Point Break” in casual conversation? The same reason the 2018 Cheez-It Bowl was arguably the pinnacle of college football Twitter. It says we’re all in on the same joke — a joke that has long since ceased to be funny and, instead, evolved into a sort of personal identity. Bad football brings us together.
Think of it in those terms — applauding sincere effort, craving the unexpected, reveling in upended power dynamics, bonding over shared misery — and bad college football is something more than just sport. It’s the very heart of being an American.
Or, maybe it’s just funny to see how many times Iowa can punt in one game.
JORDAN EDMONSON AND George Smith have never met in real life, but they’ve become something like the dynamic duo of bad football over the past two seasons.
The two first crossed paths in 2020 on the social media app Discord, where groups of fans would chat about games during the course of a Saturday slate. Edmonson went to Dartmouth and, for grad school, North Texas, while Smith once considered himself “the internet’s only ULM fan,” and since they were so familiar with relatively bad football programs, they actually loved watching smaller schools and bad games.
“We found ourselves watching things like UTEP and New Mexico State and we were having so much fun with those games,” Edmonson said.
From there, the Sickos Committee was born.
The name comes from the popular meme, in which a man wearing a shirt reading “Sickos” peers through a window, while chanting, “Yes … Ha ha ha … Yes!” It’s an avatar for Edmonson, Smith and their now nearly 80,000 Twitter followers’ obsession with bad football — or, as Smith calls it, “unconventionally appealing football.”
Yes, Smith knows this makes him sound like a hipster, but there’s nothing ironic about the Sickos, he said. The goal is to give a little shine to the teams that never quite muscle their way into the spotlight on their own.
“Our motto here is all football is good football,” Smith said. “This is not something to punch down. We do the meme thing when someone does something silly, but we’re trying to find joy in [the ridiculous] and — like the Iowa fans really embraced us.”
Ah, yes, Iowa — a team that found new ways to not score points on a weekly basis. The Hawkeyes were an absolute delight.
To say there is genuine excitement for Iowa’s date with Kentucky in this year’s TransPerfect Music City Bowl would be a massive understatement. The Hawkeyes’ hapless offense will face off against a Kentucky team that was held to 21 points or less in six of its past eight games — and both teams will play without their starting quarterbacks. The over/under is currently 31, and even that seems like a long shot.
Of course, any true fan of sickos football can tell you the Music City Bowl has a long way to go to eclipse the biggest train wreck in bowl history.
Jason Benetti called the 2018 Cheez-It Bowl for ESPN and he struggles to decide his favorite moment. On one hand, TCU’s sports information director got called for a penalty, “and that should be the most ridiculous thing that happens in a game,” Benetti said. But then how can he overlook the fact that two — two! — interceptions were overturned because the quarterback was beyond the line of scrimmage when he threw the pass?
Oh, and the game still had nine interceptions.
At the end of regulation, Cal and TCU were tied at 7. Of course this game needed overtime.
Benetti said he’s used to getting texts from a few friends during games, “but by the end of this one, like half my phonebook had texted me asking, ‘What the hell was that?'”
Benetti chalked it up to a thesis he once heard on an episode of “This American Life” titled “Fiasco.” It states that at the beginning of a performance, the audience is rooting for the performers. They want a good show. But as more and more things go wrong, a Rubicon is crossed, and soon, the audience is simply rooting for more chaos.
The Onion didn’t design the Sickos meme for this game, but it fits perfectly.
And here’s the thing Benetti has realized about that game — and about the genuine love of bad football. It’s a contradiction that feels natural on a college campus. When we’re young, we can thumb our noses at authority and defy the tropes of everyday life and do something dumb just for laughs and never give a second thought to the larger repercussions. After college, the real world narrows our focus and insists we strive toward success.
Bad college football, Benetti said, isn’t just bad. It’s subversive, and it offers a small taste of a time when we were too.
SOMEWHERE DEEP WITHIN the bowels of Bottom 10 Headquarters, past the cardboard cutout of Charlie Weis, the shattered remnants of the Civil ConFLiCT trophy and the boxes of Florida State‘s unused turnover backpacks, Ryan McGee has been studying awful college football for — well, it’s hard to keep track of time after sifting through UMass game tape. It’s been a while though.
McGee authors ESPN’s weekly Bottom 10 rankings, which rewards — is that the right word? — the worst 10 teams in the country for their ongoing efforts to escape their miserable lots in life. It is, he swears, an act of love.
Well, maybe not for places like Nebraska or Texas A&M. They’re more like the jocks who are forced to play Dungeons & Dragons with the AV Club kids. They’ll learn to love it, but those initial weeks are uncomfortable, to say the least.
For everyone else, however, there’s a strange honor in being part of the Bottom 10. Anyone can have a bad season, after all, but 4-8 is forgettable, while 1-11 is an all-out, hair-on-fire joyride. There’s a real logic in the notion that, if you’re going to be bad, at least be bad enough to be interesting.
Cam Warner has been a Kansas fan his entire life, and he’s all too familiar with the Bottom 10. For more than a decade, it was home. Was he happy about it? It’s complicated.
“Even just seeing Kansas on a list for being bad was better than not being on anything,” Warner said, “because it’s recognition. It’s seeing what you identify with out in the public, and I think that’s always cool — like, I identify with that, with being one of the Forgotten Ones. I mean, I think about Bowling Green more than I think about Wake Forest.”
(Note to Dave Clawson, who coached at both of those schools: Warner’s examples are purely his own, and any and all complaints should be directed to him.)
To be truly at the bottom — rock bottom — offers a lot of freedom to accept failure and find joy in even the smallest success.
Once, in the 2015 opener against South Dakota State, Kansas flubbed an attempt to spike the ball and stop the clock on a potential game-tying drive because the center snapped the ball over the quarterback’s head, and the QB’s knee touched the ground as he recovered the errant snap.
It was misery — but it was memorable.
Twice during Kansas’ decade of misery, the Jayhawks managed to knock off big, bad Texas.
Those wins were memorable because of all the misery that preceded them.
The enjoyment of college football isn’t measured linearly. It’s actually a circle, whereby the distance between abject failure and transcendent joy can be covered by just one small step.
McGee remembers watching New Mexico State play Idaho in 2015, when the Aggies were riding a 17-game losing streak — the nation’s longest at the time. New Mexico State, leading 55-48, survived a final Idaho drive when a Vandals pass was deflected by one defender then intercepted by another, who used his feet to corral the pick. It was sheer lunacy.
After the game, at nearly 2 a.m. on the East Coast, McGee’s phone rang. It was the Aggies’ sports information director with a message.
“You need to know,” the SID said, “that as we were celebrating in the locker room, I had a player ask me, ‘Do you think this gets us out of the Bottom 10?'”
WARNER GAINED FAME when a camera caught him in the stands during another ugly Kansas loss in 2017. He was holding a sign — white paper with three words printed on it: I am sad.
This is the part of bad football no one likes to talk about. It may be fun or exciting or hilarious for the casual observer, but for those who live with it week after week, year after year, it is also a little sad. It is sad because, for some small group of die-hards, Stohl’s formula is off. The cost of consumption is actually quite high. They’re bought in. They have hope. They’re Charlie Brown thinking maybe this time, Lucy won’t pull the ball away at the last second.
Warner’s moment of infamy only told half the story, after all. He had a second sign, too, on which he’d printed a different message: I am happy. He planned to hold that one up when Kansas made a big play. Poor fool.
If that’s the burden for fans, it can feel like an absolutely crushing weight for the coaches and players, UConn athletics director David Benedict said.
“[Head coach] Jim [Mora] came in and changed the mindset of our student-athletes and instilled a confidence and an expectation on how they have to work to be successful,” Benedict said. “That’s one of the most difficult things to do in coaching. When you come into a program that hasn’t won for a decade, it’s tough. It’s really tough.”
And yet, sometimes the hope is rewarded. Sometimes, the stars align. Sometimes bad football is just the long, grueling precursor to something better.
This season, ESPN’s College Gameday came to Lawrence, Kansas.
This season, Tulane is headed to the Goodyear Cotton Bowl.
This season, UConn won six games — a total Benedict fully believed could happen, “even if it might’ve seemed delusional.” He now views this as just a starting point.
“It’s easy for people on the outside to crush your program when you’re not having success,” Benedict said. “But the bottom line is it was a hard program to root for over the past decade, but that’s what’s so fun right now.”
At New Mexico State, Kill was more subdued in his optimism. Six wins never crossed his mind. In fact, he set eight goals for his team — things like reliability, accountability and respect for authority that he had displayed on the video board during every practice. None mentioned winning.
Still, on his first day at New Mexico State, Kill told his players to practice celebrating. It must have sounded like dialogue from “The Room,” completely detached from the plot. But for Kill, it was the only way to start a new story.
“The first day I took the job, I made them take a victory lap,” Kill said. “Because every time we win, you’re going to take a victory lap and thank the fans. So we practice it.”
A funny thing happened after that. New Mexico State started winning — six of its last eight games to end the 2022 season. The Aggies will play in a bowl, just their second since 1960. And their fans — the ones in Las Cruces and the ones who’d watched out of morbid curiosity — can finally take a victory lap, too.
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Tim Keown
A local television news crew was stationed outside the Sawyer Hotel in downtown Sacramento on Sunday night, ready to catch every nuance of the magical moment the bleary-eyed Chicago Cubs stepped off their bus to enter the lobby. This was the first time a major league baseball team had arrived in Sacramento to play a legally sanctioned regular-season game, and no story was too small. If you ever wondered what Ian Happ looks like walking toward a hotel and being surprised by the presence of a camera and a reporter, CBS-13 was the channel for you.
“That was different,” Cubs pitcher Matthew Boyd said. “But it’s the first time a big league team has come to Sacramento, and they’re excited. Baseball’s that cool thing that brings everyone together.”
It was quite a week for Sacramento — more specifically, West Sacramento, the place with the street signs declaring it “The Baseball Side of the River.” It got to host the first three games of the Athletics’ expected three-season interregnum between Oakland and Las Vegas, and it got to call a big league team its own, even if the team has decided to declare itself simply the Athletics, a geographically nonspecific generic version of a Major League Baseball team.
It’s tough to explain the vibe at Sutter Health Park for the first series. It looked like big league baseball and sounded like big league baseball; it just didn’t feel like big league baseball. The crowds were mostly sedate, maybe because there’s room for only about 14,000 fans, and maybe because the Athletics were outscored 35-9 over the course of the three games, the first and third of which could have been stopped for humanitarian reasons.
This is a team that is supposed to be better this season, and three games shouldn’t change that expectation. It spent some money nobody knew it had on a free agent contract for Luis Severino and extensions for Brent Rooker and Lawrence Butler, moves that assured a payroll high enough to abide by the revenue-sharing rules of the collective bargaining agreement, but moves that improved the team nonetheless. (You’ve got to spend money to make money is an adage that, for the first time, appealed to owner John Fisher.) The A’s have a universally respected manager in Mark Kotsay, several promising young players from recent drafts and the confidence that came from playing really good baseball over last season’s second half. There is a creeping suspicion that they could be building something that could make West Sacramento proud.
It’s a long, maybe even interminable season that will contain every iteration of peak and valley. Three games can end up being the equivalent of one breath over the course of a lifetime. But still, it’s impossible to deny the Athletics brought back a lot of their old classics for their Sacramento debut: They walked 10 batters in Monday night’s home opener; they kicked the ball around enough for four unearned runs in three games; they walked seven more Wednesday afternoon. The crowds were mostly quiet; the numerous Cubs fans were noisy until it felt mean, but the A’s fans, when they found something cheer-worthy, reacted as if they were cheering for someone else’s kid at a piano recital. As first impressions go, it could have been better.
The A’s players, in their defense, are going through an adjustment period. When I asked closer Mason Miller how he likes Sacramento, he starts counting on his fingers and says, “I’ve literally spent five nights here.” They’re young, wealthy and accustomed to living in a new place every season as they progress through the minor leagues, and they’re trying to view their new home as an opportunity to bond over experiencing something together for the first time.
“We’re all new here,” rookie second baseman Max Muncy says, “so even though I’m a rookie, I can earn some cred if I find a good restaurant and let everyone know.” I mention the toughest reservation in town, a Michelin-starred, fixed-price restaurant less than 2 miles away.
“That sounds like a two-month wait,” he says.
“Not if you tell them who you are,” I joke.
“Yeah, I can’t imagine doing that,” he says. “Besides, if I say, ‘Max Muncy,’ when I show up they’ll say, ‘Oh great, we got this one.'”
The A’s bigger concern is playing the next three seasons in a minor league ballpark and sharing it with a minor league team, the Triple-A Sacramento River Cats. It’s kind of like a senior rooming with a freshman; the senior has dibs on just about everything, but he still has to deal with the roommate. For the A’s, that means wondering how the field will hold up over the course of the 155 games it’ll wear this season, and figuring out how to cope with having a clubhouse beyond the outfield wall, disconnected from the dugout.
Severino made his first home start for the A’s on Tuesday night, and he had to tweak his routine to account for the new reality: Once he left the clubhouse, there was no going back. It was cold and windy, so he had to make sure his jacket made it to the dugout with him. The notes he likes to reference during the game had to be there, too. His usual practice of popping into the clubhouse to watch the game on television while his team hits (“It looks easier and more fun on TV,” he says with a laugh) is on hold for home starts for the foreseeable future. He had to sit there with his teammates whether he pitched well or not — on Tuesday: not — and know that every one of his emotions would be picked up by at least five cameras.
“You just have to stick it out,” Severino says. “You can’t have all the stuff you have in a normal stadium. When you go out there, you have to bring everything with you. You have to try to stay warm and find out a different routine. It’s not the same, but the thing is, it doesn’t matter because it’s happening, and we need to get used to it. Just treat it like spring training, because it feels like spring training.”
Players coming off the bench to pinch-hit or play defense have nowhere to get loose. In any other park, they’d jump into the cage behind the dugout and take some swings or stretch out and run a few sprints. Here, they have to do whatever they can do within the confines of the dugout. “Just do some arm circles and maybe run in place,” Cubs infielder Jon Berti says. “Make it old-school.”
Just one of the three games sold out, an unexpected development after months of civic backslapping and grand proclamations about Sacramento cementing its status as a major league city. Tickets for Wednesday’s game, which drew 9,342 fans, were selling on the secondary market for $20 about 30 minutes before first pitch. The A’s have the highest median ticket prices — $181 — in baseball, according to data compiled by the ticket app Gametime. The idea was to employ the time-honored scarcity=demand concept to seize maximum profits from minimal opportunities, but one sellout — the opener, which also included roughly 2,000 comped tickets — in the first three games shows the A’s remain capable of straining even the most fundamental economic concepts.
It’s probably not fair to judge Sacramento’s worth as a baseball town based on its willingness to support a team that won’t be identified by the city’s name during its time here. And it’s definitely not fair to judge a region based on the number of fans eager to hand money to an owner who pulled the team out of Oakland after 57 years and is on his way to Las Vegas.
In the days after Kings/River Cats owner Vivek Ranadive joined with Fisher to bring the A’s to Sacramento, someone identified to me as “as Sacramento as it gets” sent a text that illustrates the conflict that lives within the Sacramento sports fan:
So many thoughts as I’ve been following this:
1) I hate it in that we are just bailing out Fisher
2) I hate that we are basically acting as Seattle a decade ago with regards to the Kings and poached the A’s away from Oakland. That’s an awful feeling I wish on no one
3) I am interested to see if this actually goes anywhere other than just bailing out Fisher for 3 years while he waits out whatever magic is gonna happen in LV
4) Reeeeeally wish Vivek read the room on this one
5) We could buy $30 lawn seats and catch a ball from Mike Trout or even better, [Austin] Slater, on a Wednesday night in Sac. That would be wild
The A’s are quick to point out that there weren’t many crowds of 10,000 on Tuesday nights in Oakland. (There was just one last year, during the final homestand of the season.) Still, Sacramento is a city attempting to use this three- to four-year run to audition for its own big league team. And if the A’s can’t sell out a minor league stadium in an area with established fans of the team, what does that foretell for their eventual move to Las Vegas, where the team is forecasting sellout crowds, including nearly 5,000 tourists per game — in a 33,000-seat stadium in an area with no connection to the A’s?
But that’s someone else’s problem, some other day. Three trips this week to Sutter Health — Sunday for the River Cats, Monday and Wednesday for the A’s — was a chance to watch big league baseball in a quaint, intimate ballpark. I thought it might be like venturing back in time, maybe what it felt like to watch a Philadelphia A’s game in 1907 at Columbia Park if Columbia Park had a state-of-the-art video screen that looks like an 86-inch television hanging from the wall of a studio apartment. This would be baseball back when games were just games and big league ballparks didn’t feel obligated to stock luxury suites with $300 cabernet and fist-sized prawns. Back to when every concession stand sold pretty much the same thing (at Sutter Health, each vendor has a set menu and one or two “specialty” items, like the pizza at Pizza & Pints) and fans could bring a chair or sit on the grass out in right field and dream of Mike Trout or Austin Slater.
Its charms are undeniable, but sustainable? The workers in the ballpark are all genial and helpful, thrilled with having major league baseball in their humble yard, but maybe we should check back in August. At the River Cats’ game Sunday, I spoke with an employee working in the team store who laid out the process of turning it from a River Cats’ store to an Athletics’ store over the course of roughly 24 hours. Starting at 5 p.m. Sunday, three overlapping shifts worked through the night and well into Monday, folding and packing and hauling out all the minor league gear, storing it somewhere she isn’t privy to, while hauling in all the big league gear, unpacking it, unfolding it and displaying it nicely enough that someone might feel compelled to forfeit $134.99 for an authentic JJ Bleday jersey.
As she detailed the process, and the time constraints, knowing this River Cats-to-A’s and vice versa conga will take place roughly every 10 days to two weeks over the next six months, I was beginning to feel stressed just looking at every cap, sock, T-shirt, bobblehead, Dinger the mascot doll and performance men’s half-zip pullover sweatshirt that awaited their attention.
“Will it get done?” I asked her.
She laughed.
“I guess it has to,” she said, “but I’m off tomorrow.”
And poof, just as there was no sign of the A’s on Sunday, there was no sign of the River Cats on Monday. Everything brick red and gold was replaced by something kelly green and gold. Even the sign proclaiming Sacramento’s Triple-A championships was replaced by one proclaiming the A’s nine World Series wins, five in Philadelphia and four in Oakland. But, like everything else involving the 2025 Athletics, there is no geographic designation. As the A’s know better than most, you are where you are until you’re where you want to be.
The opening weekend of the 2025 MLB season was taken over by a surprise star — torpedo bats.
The bowling pin-shaped bats became the talk of the sport after the Yankees’ home run onslaught on the first Saturday of the season put it in the spotlight and the buzz hasn’t slowed since.
What exactly is a torpedo bat? How does it help hitters? And how is it legal? Let’s dig in.
Read: An MIT-educated professor, the Yankees and the bat that could be changing baseball
What is a torpedo bat and why is it different from a traditional MLB bat?
The idea of the torpedo bat is to take a size format — say, 34 inches and 32 ounces — and distribute the wood in a different geometric shape than the traditional form to ensure the fattest part of the bat is located where the player makes the most contact. Standard bats taper toward an end cap that is as thick diametrically as the sweet spot of the barrel. The torpedo bat moves some of the mass on the end of the bat about 6 to 7 inches lower, giving it a bowling-pin shape, with a much thinner end.
How does it help hitters?
The benefits for those who like swinging with it — and not everyone who has swung it likes it — are two-fold. Both are rooted in logic and physics. The first is that distributing more mass to the area of most frequent contact aligns with players’ swing patterns and provides greater impact when bat strikes ball. Players are perpetually seeking ways to barrel more balls, and while swings that connect on the end of the bat and toward the handle probably will have worse performance than with a traditional bat, that’s a tradeoff they’re willing to make for the additional slug. And as hitters know, slug is what pays.
The second benefit, in theory, is increased bat speed. Imagine a sledgehammer and a broomstick that both weigh 32 ounces. The sledgehammer’s weight is almost all at the end, whereas the broomstick’s is distributed evenly. Which is easier to swing fast? The broomstick, of course, because shape of the sledgehammer takes more strength and effort to move. By shedding some of the weight off the end of the torpedo bat and moving it toward the middle, hitters have found it swings very similarly to a traditional model but with slightly faster bat velocity.
Why did it become such a big story so early in the 2025 MLB season?
Because the New York Yankees hit nine home runs in a game Saturday and Michael Kay, their play-by-play announcer, pointed out that some of them came from hitters using a new bat shape. The fascination was immediate. While baseball, as an industry, has implemented forward-thinking rules in recent seasons, the modification to something so fundamental and known as the shape of a bat registered as bizarre. The initial response from many who saw it: How is this legal?
OK. How is this legal?
Major League Baseball’s bat regulations are relatively permissive. Currently, the rules allow for a maximum barrel diameter of 2.61 inches, a maximum length of 42 inches and a smooth and round shape. The lack of restrictions allows MLB’s authorized bat manufacturers to toy with bat geometry and for the results to still fall within the regulations.
Who came up with the idea of using them?
The notion of a bowling-pin-style bat has kicked around baseball for years. Some bat manufacturers made smaller versions as training tools. But the version that’s now infiltrating baseball goes back two years when a then-Yankees coach named Aaron Leanhardt started asking hitters how they should counteract the giant leaps in recent years made by pitchers.
When Yankees players responded that bigger barrels would help, Leanhardt — an MIT-educated former Michigan physics professor who left academia to work in the sports industry — recognized that as long as bats stayed within MLB parameters, he could change their geometry to make them a reality. Leanhardt, who left the Yankees to serve as major league field coordinator for the Miami Marlins over the winter, worked with bat manufacturers throughout the 2023 and 2024 seasons to make that a reality.
When did it first appear in MLB games?
It’s unclear specifically when. But Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton used a torpedo bat last year and went on a home run-hitting rampage in October that helped send the Yankees to the World Series. New York Mets star Francisco Lindor also used a torpedo-style bat last year and went on to finish second in National League MVP voting.
Who are some of the other notable early users of torpedo bats?
In addition to Stanton and Lindor, Yankees hitters Anthony Volpe, Austin Wells, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Cody Bellinger and Paul Goldschmidt have used torpedoes to great success. Others who have used them in games include Tampa Bay’s Junior Caminero, Minnesota’s Ryan Jeffers and Toronto’s Davis Schneider. And that’s just the beginning. Hundreds more players are expected to test out torpedoes — and perhaps use them in games — in the coming weeks.
How is this different from a corked bat?
Corking bats involves drilling a hole at the end of the bat, filling it in and capping it. The use of altered bats allows players to swing faster because the material with which they replace the wood — whether it’s cork, superballs or another material — is lighter. Any sort of bat adulteration is illegal and, if found, results in suspension.
Could a rule be changed to ban them?
Could it happen? Sure. Leagues and governing bodies have put restrictions on equipment they believe fundamentally altered fairness. Stick curvature is limited in hockey. Full-body swimsuits made of polyurethane and neoprene are banned by World Aquatics. But officials at MLB have acknowledged that the game’s pendulum has swung significantly toward pitching in recent years, and if an offensive revolution comes about because of torpedo bats — and that is far from a guarantee — it could bring about more balance to the game. If that pendulum swings too far, MLB could alter its bat regulations, something it has done multiple times already this century.
So the torpedo bat is here to stay?
Absolutely. Bat manufacturers are cranking them out and shipping them to interested players with great urgency. Just how widely the torpedo bat is adopted is the question that will play out over the rest of the season. But it has piqued the curiosity of nearly every hitter in the big leagues, and just as pitchers toy with new pitches to see if they can marginally improve themselves, hitters will do the same with bats.
Comfort is paramount with a bat, so hitters will test them during batting practice and in cage sessions before unleashing them during the game. As time goes on, players will find specific shapes that are most comfortable to them and best suit their swing during bat-fitting sessions — similar to how golfers seek custom clubs. But make no mistake: This is an almost-overnight alteration of the game, and “traditional or torpedo” is a question every big leaguer going forward will ask himself.
ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — The once and possibly future home of the Tampa Bay Rays will get a new roof to replace the one shredded by Hurricane Milton with the goal of having the ballpark ready for the 2026 season, city officials decided in a vote Thursday.
The St. Petersburg City Council voted 7-1 to approve $22.5 million to begin the repairs at Tropicana Field, which will start with a membrane roof that must be in place before other work can continue. Although the Rays pulled out of a planned $1.3 billion new stadium deal, the city is still contractually obligated to fix the Trop.
“We are legally bound by an agreement. The agreement requires us to fix the stadium,” said council member Lissett Hanewicz, who is an attorney. “We need to go forward with the roof repair so we can do the other repairs.”
The hurricane damage forced the Rays to play home games this season at Steinbrenner Field across the bay in Tampa, the spring training home of the New York Yankees. The Rays went 4-2 on their first homestand ever at an open-air ballpark, which seats around 11,000 fans.
Under the current agreement with the city, the Rays owe three more seasons at the Trop once it’s ready again for baseball, through 2028. It’s unclear if the Rays will maintain a long-term commitment to the city or look to Tampa or someplace else for a new stadium. Major League Baseball has said keeping the team in the Tampa Bay region is a priority. The Rays have played at the Trop since their inception in 1998.
The team said it would have a statement on the vote later Thursday.
The overall cost of Tropicana Field repairs is estimated at $56 million, said city architect Raul Quintana. After the roof, the work includes fixing the playing surface, ensuring audio and visual electronics are working, installing flooring and drywall, getting concession stands running and other issues.
“This is a very complex project. We feel like we’re in a good place,” Quintana said at the council meeting Thursday.
Under the proposed timeline, the roof installation will take about 10 months. The unique membrane system is fabricated in Germany and assembled in China, Quintana said, adding that officials are examining how President Donald Trump’s new tariffs might affect the cost.
The new roof, he added, will be able to withstand hurricane winds as high as 165 mph. Hurricane Milton, one of the strongest hurricanes ever in the Atlantic basin at one point, blasted ashore Oct. 9 south of Tampa Bay with Category 3 winds of about 125 mph.
Citing mounting costs, the Rays last month pulled out of a deal with the city and Pinellas County for a new $1.3 billion ballpark to be built near the Trop site. That was part of a broader $6.5 billion project known as the Historic Gas Plant district to bring housing, retail and restaurants, arts and a Black history museum to a once-thriving Black neighborhood razed for the original stadium.
The city council plans to vote on additional Trop repair costs over the next few months.
“This is our contractual obligation. I don’t like it more than anybody else. I’d much rather be spending that money on hurricane recovery and helping residents in the most affected neighborhoods,” council member Brandi Gabbard said. “These are the cards that we’re dealt.”
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