
Bowls, sponsors navigating NIL era
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adminOn the morning of Dec. 29, a pair of football players — one from Oklahoma and the other from Florida State — will post messages to their social media accounts while surrounded by fake cheese throw pillows and cracker-inspired interior design. They’ll let followers know that, much like an anthropomorphized, excited wheel of cheddar wearing shoulder pads in a long-running television commercial, they have woken up “feeling the cheesiest.” The folks at Kellogg’s will pay them to do so.
Later that evening, the two players, who have not yet been publicly identified, will join their teammates to play in the Cheez-It Bowl in Orlando, Florida. In the current transitory business model of the multibillion-dollar college sports industry, this is one example of how money now reaches the main source of labor.
While NCAA rules place limits on how schools can pay athletes, the ability for players to make money from their name, image and likeness in the past 18 months has led to a series of new, creative ways for businesses and boosters to divert money that might have previously flowed through schools, and with far fewer limits, give it directly to athletes.
Boosters, for example, can now channel money to athletes by having them endorse a product, make appearances or sign autographs. Competition has led boosters to rapidly organize themselves into collectives that have played a big role in reshaping recruiting. If current regulations dictating how college athletes can be paid remain the same, several experts told ESPN that sporting events not operated by the NCAA — bowl games and midseason basketball tournaments, for example — are headed down a similar path, using NIL deals to attract the best teams possible to their event.
“One thing we’ve seen in the first 18 months of the NIL era is some are quicker to move than others,” said Andrew Donovan, executive vice president of Altius Sports Partners, an NIL consulting company that works with dozens of colleges. “But once two or three move, others follow suit. I think you’re going to see the same thing in the event space.”
Not all bowl games are created equal. Some lower-tier games might not generate the budget or incentive to find ways to help facilitate significant NIL deals for their participants. But the prospect of NIL deals becoming a common perk for bowl participants raises an interesting question for the very top tier of the sport’s postseason — the College Football Playoff, a private business governed by the 10 FBS conferences and Notre Dame. If college athletes remain quasi-amateurs, will the CFP use some of those same creative NIL paths to share money with players? Will it want to?
“It would be premature to speculate on how that revenue might be distributed in the next agreement,” CFP executive director Bill Hancock told ESPN this week.
The NCAA published new guidelines in October in an attempt to clarify what NIL activities are allowed and what falls on the wrong side of the sparse rules. The final bullet point of the four-page document said players could not be paid “directly or indirectly for promoting an athletics competition in which they participate.”
Even to those who wrote the guidelines, it’s not clear what would count as an indirect payment related to a bowl game.
Can the Oklahoma and Florida State players posting from their Cheez-It-themed hotel rooms remind their followers how to watch their game that night? Can they mention the reason they are in a cracker-inspired hotel room? Or say that they are carbo-loading with Cheez-Its to help them play their best in the Cheez-It Bowl that night?
Lynda Tealer, who chaired the NCAA working group that wrote the October guidelines and works as an administrator in the University of Florida athletic department, said it was up to the NCAA enforcement staff to make decisions on what crosses a vague line into prohibited payments. The NCAA declined ESPN’s request to speak with enforcement staff.
Toby Baldwin, who oversees NIL activities for the Oklahoma athletic department, said earlier this week that he didn’t yet know which, if any, of the hypothetical scenarios could potentially land a player or the school in trouble with the NCAA. He said he would likely review the player’s script before he records the promotional video and determine then how best to make sure the player isn’t crossing the blurry line between promoting a product and promoting a game sponsored by that product. This isn’t unusual for someone in Baldwin’s position trying to navigate the current rules of college sports.
“That’s to be expected,” he said. “That’s how we operate. Case by case, day by day and hour by hour.”
Florida Citrus Sports, the group that operates the Cheez-It Bowl and the Citrus Bowl along with other athletic events, is confident that the Cheez-It deal is on solid ground with NCAA rules because the athletes are being paid to promote the title sponsor and not the game itself. CEO Steve Hogan said he and his employees have been exploring ways to use NIL to make sure players in their games got the best possible bowl experience since the rules changed in 2021.
Hogan said they wanted to do as much as possible to provide more to athletes, but their top priority has been making sure that any NIL deals associated with the game won’t create problems for the athletes by violating NCAA rules. His chief marketing officer, Matt Repchak, said the Citrus Bowl and Cheez-It Bowl had to revise some of their plans after the NCAA provided its new guidance in October because they weren’t sure if their initial ideas would be allowed.
“I think the lack of certainty around what is allowable is slowing the earning potential of everybody — all players, all opportunities,” Hogan said. “A lot of people don’t understand what you can do. When we get a little bit more clarity, I think you’ll start to see [more]. The money will be there. Right now it’s hemmed up in bureaucracy.”
Hogan isn’t alone. Michael Zoerb oversees NIL deals that are associated with bowl games for Opendorse, one of the largest NIL-facilitating companies in the industry. Zoerb said the number of endorsement campaigns Opendorse has helped to broker that overlap with certain bowl games has dropped from 10 last year to six this bowl season. He attributed that drop to the vagueness of the NCAA’s new guidelines.
“We actually got a bit of a curveball thrown at us with the NCAA guidance,” Zoerb said. “Unfortunately, what resulted was more questions. I believe we would have seen quite a bit more activity this year from bowls had that guidance not come out.”
The bowl games that have gone forward with NIL plans have had to find creative ways to spend their marketing dollars on athletes without potentially stepping into an NCAA gray area. The Charlotte Sports Foundation, which operates the Duke’s Mayo Bowl, plans to pay a player from this year’s game $5,000 to be an ambassador for the bowl throughout the coming year. Because of the NCAA’s guidance, the foundation is limited to picking a player who has exhausted his eligibility.
At the Memphis-based Liberty Bowl, a local sponsor is running a campaign to raise money for the St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, also in Memphis. Players from both Arkansas and Kansas have sent tweets that include a link where fans can donate and an explanation that half the money raised will go to the children’s hospital and the other half goes to players who are helping with promotion.
ESPN, which operates 17 bowl games and several college basketball contests, has not yet been directly involved in NIL deals associated with those events. The company is “investigating the viability, application and possible outcomes of NIL for its business,” said Clint Overby, vice president of ESPN Events.
Zoerb said most deals Opendorse has facilitated this bowl season have been paid by bowl sponsors rather than the bowl operators. But it’s not clear that a bowl game operator would be breaking the rules if it paid a player to promote something else associated with the weeklong bowl experience rather than the game itself. For example, it’s unclear if Florida Citrus Sports could pay players to show up and sign autographs the day before a game at a fan event.
“That’s one of the clarifications we’d love to get from the NCAA,” Zoerb said. “If the bowl games want to pay players to promote their sponsors and not the game, from the way that it’s written that seems like it would be OK. But most people are erring on the side of caution.”
In basketball, where midseason tournaments compete more directly to attract the most appealing teams, some event organizers have been less tentative. NIL packages are now part of every pitch that schools hear when deciding on what tournaments to attend, according to Rick Giles, president of The Gazelle Group. Giles’ company organizes several college basketball tournaments each year. He said this season it has paid players to promote the tournaments on social media. He also has signed contracts with some schools that, along with a payment to the school, include a promise that Gazelle Group will pay a certain amount of money to the booster collective associated with that school.
Giles said he and his company plan to keep offering the same deals to schools and players despite the NCAA’s newest guidance.
“It’s a part of every conversation now, and I think it should be,” Giles said. “We are very much in favor of paying the players. I am individually, and our company is as well. We think the players enjoying a financial benefit and compensation in exchange for promoting things is a great benefit to them and a great benefit to us.”
The NCAA has thus far been hesitant to regulate NIL activity in a way that appears to limit any financial opportunities for athletes. Heavy-handed rules could prompt legal complaints for antitrust violations, which the NCAA has struggled to successfully defend in court in recent years. Several experts believe that a hands-off approach to investigating NIL deals that are associated with tournaments or bowl games, combined with competition to attract the best teams, inevitably will lead to NIL packages becoming a ubiquitous part of these events.
Bowl games fill their matchups through long-term contracts with conferences rather than yearly negotiations with individual teams. Competition to create the best product moves on a different timeline than in the basketball world, but in the long run, bowl games also compete with one another to create the best experience possible for athletes in hopes of moving up the pecking order of a conference’s bowl lineup to attract better teams and better TV ratings.
Donovan from Altius Sports Partners said the schools he works with haven’t raised many questions about NIL packages associated with bowl games yet, but he sees a bevy of possibilities for bowl games, which are working to build their reputations for providing great experiences for teams and players.
“It just seems like there’s a lot of low-hanging fruit for some of those opportunities that would help the bowl games, help their sponsors and help the athletes,” he said.
Tealer said a future in which bowl games are competing with one another to create attractive NIL packages for participants is likely if Congress doesn’t create new federal laws that give the NCAA the ability to create and enforce rules without running into legal problems.
“Without national legislation, we’ll end up in some version of what you described,” she said. “And I don’t have a judgment if that’s right or wrong. We’re not making an effort to claw back privileges around NIL.”
If college football does move into a future where the majority of bowl game operators are taking some of the money they make from their events and sharing it with players via NIL deals, that could put the College Football Playoff in a potentially awkward position in coming years.
Unlike most NCAA championship tournaments, the soon-to-be 12-team playoff in football is operated by a private company called the College Football Playoff. It also operates a charitable foundation. If other bowls pave a path to finding creative ways to share some of their earnings with players, could the CFP pay its players to promote its charitable foundation?
Hancock, the CFP’s executive director, said there are no current plans to change how the CFP distributes money under the current contract, which expires in 2026. He said it was too early to make any comments about whether that kind of arrangement could exist in the future.
A portion of the money generated by the CFP already goes to supporting players and their families — directly through helping them travel to games, and indirectly by filtering through conference payouts to individual schools, which use those funds to cover the cost of scholarships, stipends and other benefits the players receive. However, the CFP’s revenue is expected to grow significantly when it signs its next broadcast rights contract. And if the NCAA’s current rules remain intact, schools won’t be able to pass on that increase to players in the form of any direct compensation.
Some players, such as Ohio State’s CJ Stroud, and coaches such as Michigan’s Jim Harbaugh, who are participating in this year’s semifinals, already have said publicly that they believe players should get a bigger share of the revenue raised by the sport’s lucrative television contracts.
If other private companies that operate bowl games are finding creative ways to share their revenue through NIL deals without NCAA penalties, the members of the College Football Playoff — which is to say, conference commissioners and athletic department leaders — might find themselves in a position where they have to either follow suit or explain why they are willing to pay their coaches hefty bonuses for winning championships while stopping short of doing everything they can to share money with their players.
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Jeff LegwoldApr 4, 2025, 12:41 PM ET
Close- Jeff Legwold covers the Denver Broncos at ESPN. He has covered the Broncos for more than 20 years and also assists with NFL draft coverage, joining ESPN in 2013. He has been a member of the Pro Football Hall of Fame Board of Selectors since 1999, too. Jeff previously covered the Pittsburgh Steelers, Buffalo Bills and Houston Oilers/Tennessee Titans at previous stops prior to ESPN.
BOULDER, Colo. — A horde of NFL talent evaluators headed for the mountains Friday for the Colorado Showcase, where Heisman Trophy winner Travis Hunter was one of the big draws.
However, it was going to be a limited look at best as Hunter was not seen when players’ heights and weights were taken or for the jumps and 40-yard dash.
Hunter, who is expected to be a top-five selection in this year’s draft and is the No. 1 player on Mel Kiper Jr.’s Big Board, was initially not expected to participate in any on-field work, but Friday morning some scouts in attendance said they expected the two-way star to run routes as a receiver for quarterback Shedeur Sanders‘ throwing session.
Hunter did not work out at the scouting combine or Big 12 pro day but did meet with teams in Indianapolis. Sanders, one of the top quarterbacks on the board and Kiper’s No. 5 player overall, also did not work out at the combine.
Sanders’ brother, Colorado safety Shilo Sanders, measured in at 5-foot-11⅞, 196 pounds, but he did not participate in the jumps or bench press that opened the workout, citing a right shoulder injury.
The highly attended event — by scouts, coaches and personnel executives as well as fans packing small bleachers — had a festive atmosphere. Colorado coach Deion Sanders named it the “We Ain’t Hard 2 Find Showcase,” completed with a large lighted “showcase” sign next to the drills.
Hunter, who has said he wants to play offense and defense in the NFL, won the Chuck Bednarik (top defensive player) and Biletnikoff (top receiver) awards, in addition to the Heisman. He said whether he would primarily be a wide receiver or cornerback in the NFL “depended on the team that picks me.”
He had 96 catches for 1,258 yards and 15 touchdowns as a receiver last season to go with 35 tackles, 11 pass breakups and four interceptions at cornerback. In the Buffaloes’ regular-season finale against Oklahoma State, he became the only FBS player in the past 25 years with three scrimmage touchdowns on offense and an interception in the same game, according to ESPN Research.
Hunter played 1,380 total snaps in Colorado’s 12 regular-season games: 670 on offense, 686 on defense and 24 on special teams. He played 1,007 total snaps in 2023.
With all NFL eyes on the Colorado campus to see Sanders throw, one player who made the most of it was wide receiver Will Sheppard, who was not invited to the combine. Sheppard, who measured in at 6-2¼, 196 pounds, ran his 40s in 4.56 and 4.54 to go with a 40½-inch vertical jump and a 10-foot-11 in the broad jump.
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‘It’s taken on a life of its own’: Inside the 48 hours torpedo bats launched into baseball lore
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3 hours agoon
April 4, 2025By
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Buster OlneyApr 4, 2025, 12:00 PM ET
Close- Senior writer ESPN Magazine/ESPN.com
- Analyst/reporter ESPN television
- Author of “The Last Night of the Yankee Dynasty”
At 1:54 ET on Saturday afternoon, New York Yankees play-by-play man Michael Kay lit the fuse on what will be remembered as either one of the most metamorphic conversations in baseball history or one of its strangest.
During spring training, someone in the organization had mentioned to Kay that the team’s analytics department had counseled players on where pitches tended to strike their bats, and with subsequent buy-in from some of the players, bats had been designed around that information. In the hours before the Yankees’ home game against the Brewers that day, Kay told the YES Network production staff about this, alerting them so they could look for an opportunity to highlight the equipment.
After the Yankees clubbed four homers in the first inning, a camera zoomed in on Jazz Chisholm Jr.‘s bat in the second inning. “You see the shape of Chisholm’s bat…” Kay said on air. “It’s got a big barrel on it,” Paul O’Neill responded, before Kay went on to describe the analysis behind the bat shaped like a torpedo.
Chisholm singled to left field, and after Anthony Volpe worked the count against former teammate Nestor Cortes to a full count, Volpe belted a home run to right field using the same kind of bat. A reporter watching the game texted Kay: Didn’t he hit the meat part of the bat you were talking about — just inside where the label normally is?
Yep, Kay responded. Within an hour of Kay’s commentary, the video of Chisholm’s bat and Kay’s exchange with O’Neill was posted on multiple platforms of social media, amplified over and over. What happened over the next 48 hours was what you get when you mix the power of social media and the desperation of a generation of beleaguered hitters. Batting averages are at a historic low, strikeout rates at a historic high, and on a sunny spring day in the Bronx, here were the Yankees blasting baseballs into the seats with what seemed to be a strangely shaped magic bat.
An oasis of offense had formed on the horizon, and hitters — from big leaguers to Little Leaguers, including at least one member of Congress — paddled toward it furiously. Acres of trees will be felled and shaped to feed the thirst for this new style of bats. Last weekend, one bat salesman asked his boss, “What the heck have we done?”
Jared Smith, CEO of bat-maker Victus, said, “I’ve been making bats for 15, 16 years. … This is the most talked-about thing in the industry since I started. And I hope we can make better-performing bats that work for players.”
According to Bobby Hillerich, the vice president of production at Hillerich & Bradsby, his company — which is based in Louisville, Kentucky, and makes Louisville Slugger bats — had produced 20 versions of the torpedo bat as of this past Saturday, and in less than a week, that number has tripled as players and teams continually call in their orders.
Said Yankees manager Aaron Boone: “It’s taken on a life of its own.”
0:36
Olney: ‘Torpedo’ bats could be catching the eye of MLB teams
Buster Olney reports on the Braves exploring the new “torpedo” bats the Yankees have been using and how other teams could explore it as well.
Even though Saturday marked its launch into the mainstream, this shape of bat has actually been around for a while. Hillerich & Bradsby had its first contact with a team about the style in 2021 and had nondisclosure agreements with four teams as the bat evolved; back then, it was referred to as the “bowling pin” bat. The Cubs’ Nico Hoerner was the first major leaguer to try it — and apparently wasn’t comfortable with it. Cody Bellinger tried it when he was with the Cubs before joining the Yankees during the offseason.
Before Atlanta took the field Sunday night, Braves catcher Drake Baldwin recalled trying one in the Arizona Fall League last year (noting that his first impression was that it “looked weird”). Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor used it in 2024, in a year in which he would finish second in the NL MVP voting; Lindor’s was a little different from Volpe’s version, with a cup hollowed out at the end of the bat. Giancarlo Stanton swung one throughout his playoff surge last fall, but no one in the media noticed, perhaps because of how the pitch-black color of Stanton’s bat camouflaged the shape.
Minnesota manager Rocco Baldelli saw one in the Twins’ dugout during spring training and picked it up, his attention drawn to the unusual shape. “What the hell is this thing?” he asked, wondering aloud whether the design was legal. When he was assured it was, he put it back down.
Baldelli’s experience reflected the way hitters have used and assessed bats since the advent of baseball: They’ll pick up bats and see how they feel, their interest fueled by the specter of success. Tony Gwynn won eight batting titles, and many teammates and opposing hitters — Barry Bonds among them — asked whether they could inspect his bats. The torpedo bat’s arrival was simply the latest version of that long-held search for the optimal tool.
On Opening Day, eight teams had some version of the torpedo bat within their stock, according to one major league source. But with video of the Yankees’ home runs being hit off unusual bats saturating social media Saturday afternoon, the phone of Kevin Uhrhan, pro bat sales rep for Louisville Slugger, blew up with requests for torpedo bats. James Rowson, the hitting coach of the Yankees, began to get text inquiries — about 100, he later estimated. Everyone wanted to know about the bat; everyone wanted to get their own.
In San Diego, Braves players asked about the bats, and by Sunday morning, equipment manager Calvin Minasian called in the team’s order. By the middle of the week, all 30 teams had asked for the bats. “Every team started trying to get orders in,” Hillerich said. “We’re trying to scramble to get wood. And then it was: How fast can we get this to retail?”
Victus produces the bats Chisholm and Volpe are using and has made them available for retail. Three senior players, all in their 70s, stopped by the Victus store to ask about the torpedoes. A member of Congress who plays baseball reached out to Louisville Slugger.
The Cincinnati Reds contacted Hillerich & Bradsby, saying, “We need you in Cincinnati on Monday ASAP,” and soon after, Uhrhan and pro bat production manager Brian Hillerich, Bobby’s brother, made the 90-minute drive from the company’s factory in Louisville with test bats.
Reds star Elly De La Cruz tried a few, decided on a favorite and used it for a career performance that night.
“You can think in New York, maybe there was wind,” Bobby Hillerich said. “Elly hits two home runs and gets seven RBIs. That just took it to a whole new level.”
A few days after the Yankees’ explosion, Aaron Leanhardt, who had led New York’s effort to customize its bats as a minor league hitting coordinator before being hired by the Marlins as their field coordinator, was in the middle of a horseshoe of reporters, explaining the background. “There are a lot more cameras here today than I’m used to,” he said, laughing.
Stanton spoke with reporters about the simple concept behind the bat: build a design for where a hitter is most likely to make contact. “You wonder why no one has thought of it before, for sure,” Stanton said. “I didn’t know if it was, like, a rule-based thing of why they were shaped like that.”
Over and over, MLB officials assured those asking: Yes, the bats are legal and meet the sport’s equipment specifications. Trevor Megill, the Brewers’ closer, complained about the bats, calling them like “something used in slow-pitch softball,” but privately, baseball officials were thrilled by the possibility of seeing offense goosed, something they had been attempting through rule change in recent years.
“It’s all the rage right now, given what transpired over the weekend,” said Jeremy Zoll, assistant general manager of the Twins. “I’m sure more and more guys are going to experiment with it as a result, just to see if it’s something they like.”
That personal preference is a factor for which some front office types believe the mass orders of the bats don’t account: The Yankees’ recommendations to each hitter were based on months of past data of how that player tended to strike the ball. This was not about a one-size-fits all bat; it was about precise bat measurements that reflected an individual player’s swing.
“I had never heard of it. I’ve used the same bat for nine years, so I think I’ll stick with that,” White Sox outfielder Andrew Benintendi said. “It’s pretty interesting. It makes sense. If it works for a guy, good for him. If it doesn’t, stick with what you got.”
As longtime player Eric Hosmer explained on the “Baseball Tonight” podcast, the process is a lot like what players can do in golf: look for clubs customized for a player’s particular swing. And, he added, hitting coaches might begin to think more about which bat might be most effective against particular pitchers. If a pitcher tends to throw inside, a torpedo bat could be more effective; if a pitcher is more effective outside, maybe a larger barrel would be more appropriate.
That’s the key, according to an agent representing a player who ordered a bat: “You need years of hitting data in the big leagues to dial it in and hopefully get a better result. He’s still tinkering with it; he may not even use it in a game. … I think of it like switching your irons in golf to blades: It will feel a little different and take some adjusting, and it may even change your swing subtly.”
Two days after the home run explosion, Boone said, “You’re just trying to just get what you can on the margins, move the needle a little bit. And that’s really all you’re going to do. I don’t think this is some revelation to where we’re going to be — it’s not related to the weekend that we had, for example. I don’t think it’s that. Maybe in some cases, for some players it may help them incrementally. That’s how I view it.”
“I’m kind of starting to smile at it a little more … a lot of things that aren’t real.”
Said the player agent: “It’s not an aluminum bat with plutonium in it like everyone is making it out to be.”
Reliever Adam Ottavino watched this all play out, with his 15 years of experience. “It’s the Yankees and they scored a million runs in the first few games, and it’s cool to hate the Yankees and it’s cool to look for the bogeyman,” Ottavino said, “and that’s what some people are going to do, and [you] can’t really stop that. But there’s also a lot of misinformation and noneducation on it too.”
Major league baseball mostly evolves at a glacial pace. For example, the sport is well into the second century of complaints about the surface of the ball and the debate over financial disparity among teams. From time to time, however, baseball has its eclipses, moments that command full attention and inspire change. On a “Sunday Night Baseball” game on May 18, 2008, an umpire’s botched home run call at Yankee Stadium compelled MLB to implement the first instant replay. Buster Posey’s ankle was shattered in a home plate collision in May 2011, imperiling the career of the young star, and new rules about that type of play were rewritten.
The torpedo bat eruption could turn out to be transformative, a time when the industry became aware how a core piece of equipment has been taken for granted and aware that bats could be more precisely designed to augment the ability of each hitter. Or this could all turn out to be a wild overreaction to an outlier day of home runs against a pitching staff having a really bad day.
On Thursday, Cortes — who had been hammered for five homers over two innings in Yankee Stadium — shut out the Reds for six innings.
In Baltimore, Bregman, who had tried the torpedo bat earlier this week, reverted to his usual stock and had three hits against the Orioles, including a home run. Afterward, Bregman said, “It’s the hitter. Not the bat.”
This story was also reported by Jeff Passan, Jorge Castillo, Jesse Rogers and Kiley McDaniel.
Sports
What are torpedo bats? Are they legal? What to know about MLB’s hottest trend
Published
3 hours agoon
April 4, 2025By
admin
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.
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