Is Cade Klubnik the next great Clemson QB?
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David Hale, ESPN Staff Writer
CLEMSON, S.C. — Maybe it’s the hair. This much, Cade Klubnik is willing to concede. It’s neatly trimmed, parted at the side, clean-cut, professional and, yeah, a pretty close resemblance to the cut worn by his coach, Dabo Swinney.
But Swinney isn’t stopping with the hair. Klubnik’s bone structure, his facial features, the way he carries himself, assured and energetic — it’s all downright Dabo-esque, he said. They’re cut from the same DNA.
“He could be my son,” Swinney said. “He hates when I tell him that.”
Clemson‘s sophomore quarterback can argue with the notion he resembles his 53-year-old coach, but spend enough time around the two and the Klubnik-Swinney Venn diagram looks increasingly like a near-perfect circle.
There’s the unrelenting optimism. Swinney has a habit of summing up even the most bitter defeats as a chance to learn more about his team and get better, and so it sounded awfully familiar when Klubnik shrugged off the worst throw of his freshman season — an interception against Notre Dame that turned into an Irish touchdown — as something he was thankful happened.
There’s the unassuming personality. Swinney carved out his niche in college football by being, for lack of a better word, goofy. He danced awkwardly in the locker room after wins, planned a pizza party for the entire campus upon Clemson’s first playoff berth, coined slogans such as “Bring your own guts” after a win against the Irish. Klubnik might not be quite as quotable at this point in his career, but he’s certainly not image-conscious either, his high school coach, Todd Dodge, said. Klubnik, like Swinney, was beloved at Westlake High in Austin because of how little they cared about creating a slick image.
“We didn’t want cool guys — guys who were more worried about their brand than their production,” Dodge said. “And Cade is probably the most uncool football player I’ve ever coached.”
Swinney’s life was built around football. Klubnik first picked up a ball when he was 3, and from then on, he almost never set it down. Though, this is one of the real distinctions between the two. Swinney was a walk-on at Alabama, a football obsessive whose true talent was in teaching the game to others. Klubnik was so good from such an early age that his future high school coach, Todd Dodge, pegged him a star when Klubnik was in the fifth grade. Dr. Newt Hasson, who was on the sideline for every Westlake High School game for 37 years calls Klubnik the best QB to ever play there, an assessment he said his best friend agrees with. Oh, and his best friend happens to be Chip Brees, whose son, Drew, starred at Westlake in the 1990s.
Swinney is unflinchingly competitive. After Klubnik’s middle school 7-on-7 team lost in the state championship game, he delivered a rousing speech, promising to return better than ever. The team won the next two titles.
Swinney savors every victory with Tolstoy-length postgame speeches, dancing, an endless parade of handshakes and hugs with every parent and recruit he sees. That’s Klubnik, too. After Westlake won the 2021 state championship at AT&T Stadium in Dallas, the team’s announcer was packing up to leave. The lights in the stadium were off, but he could make out a figure sprinting across the field, arms in the air, squealing with joy. It was, of course, Westlake’s quarterback.
Swinney has coached his share of greats at the position — Tajh Boyd, Deshaun Watson, Trevor Lawrence — but task some advanced artificial intelligence to create the perfect quarterback for Dabo Swinney, and it would spit out an image of Cade Klubnik.
“As human beings, in our work ethic, in the nonstop energy we give off, the leadership and the way we live,” Klubnik said, “we’re pretty similar.”
It’s fitting then that, after a two-year absence behind a malfunctioning offense, Clemson begins its quest for a return to the College Football Playoff tonight against Duke (8 ET on ESPN) with Swinney’s avatar on the field running the show and a renewed sense of optimism infiltrating every crevice of the locker room.
KLUBNIK WAS A high school sophomore when his mother posed a question: If he could play for any coach in the country, who would it be?
Klubnik didn’t hesitate. The kid from Austin, Texas, who’d never even traded text messages with recruiters from Clemson wanted to play for Swinney.
For his part, Swinney had no clue who Klubnik was at the time. Clemson was hot on another blue-chip quarterback, Ty Simpson, but late in the process, offensive coordinator Brandon Streeter popped on some Westlake game tape and told Swinney that, should things fall through with their top target, Klubnik looked like a strong Plan B.
Swinney watched the film and was impressed. He picked up the phone and called Klubnik, just to make an introduction.
“We start talking,” Swinney said, “and he’s recruiting me.”
Klubnik had more than 30 offers by this point, and Swinney was upfront about Clemson’s investment in landing Simpson. But, Swinney said, if things change, Klubnik would get the next offer.
The two kept in touch, and the more they talked, the more Swinney liked the kid. On the day before Simpson was scheduled to announce his decision, Swinney pulled Streeter aside and acknowledged the elephant in the room.
“This is weird, right?” Swinney said. “We have this chance to get this great QB tomorrow, but I don’t know. I really like Klubnik.”
In Austin, Klubnik was equally smitten. He had offers from the two places his mom, Kim Klubnik, described as “dream schools” — Texas A&M and Texas — but he couldn’t stop thinking about the connection he had with Clemson. After Klubnik demurred, A&M eventually landed on Conner Weigman, closing one door, and before Simpson made his choice, Klubnik faced a deadline with the Longhorns after getting an anonymous text from someone at Texas tipping him off that Maalik Murphy was scheduled to visit campus and likely to commit.
Klubnik made some calls and was told his best bet would be to commit to Texas. He could always change his mind later. But his high school coach put a different spin on the situation.
“There aren’t many things you have in this world that no one can take away from you,” Dodge said. “Your word is one of them.”
That sealed the deal for Klubnik. He knew where he wanted to play, and it wasn’t Texas.
“He let that window close on both [in-state schools] because he wanted to play at Clemson,” his father, Tod Klubnik, said.
By late February 2021, Simpson was ready to announce his choice. The night before his announcement, Swinney got a long text message from Kim Klubnik. She thanked him for recruiting her son, gushed over how much the process had meant to him, and how much she and Tod had enjoyed getting to know Swinney and his staff.
The next morning, Simpson called Swinney with news. He was going to Alabama.
Swinney’s next call was to Klubnik.
“And he just said, ‘Well, I’m committing,'” Swinney said. “It was one of the coolest moments. He knew exactly what he wanted to do.”
SWINNEY AND KLUBNIK beamed from the dais inside Bank of America Stadium in Charlotte, North Carolina. It was Dec. 3, and the Tigers had just won the 2022 ACC championship. Klubnik was nearly perfect, completing 20 of 24 passes for 279 yards and accounting for two touchdowns.
“It was a great night,” Swinney said, “and a glimpse of our future.”
Missing from the conversation, however, was much discussion of the recent past.
If the ACC title game represented the official changing of the guard in Clemson’s quarterback room, the months that preceded it offered little foreshadowing.
Klubnik knew when he arrived on campus in January 2022 he’d open the year as a backup. DJ Uiagalelei had struggled throughout the 2021 season, but Swinney had given the veteran a heartfelt endorsement. For Swinney, Uiagalelei and Klubnik, there was no competition.
For everyone on the outside, the story was different. They’d seen Watson nab the starting job a month into his freshman season, then watched Lawrence do the same four years later, leading the Tigers to a national title in the process. Clemson fans wanted Klubnik to add to that legacy.
In Clemson’s opener, an easy win over Georgia Tech, Klubnik came on in garbage time and looked brilliant. Calls for a quarterback change began immediately, but Swinney emphatically backed his starter.
Six weeks later, Klubnik rescued Clemson from a halftime deficit against Syracuse — the result of three turnovers by Uiagalelei — and fans again assumed it was time to turn the offense over to the kid.
A week later, Klubnik got another chance in relief against Notre Dame. His first — and ultimately, his only — throw was intercepted in Clemson’s first loss of the year.
Then in the regular-season finale, Klubnik remained on the bench throughout a disastrous loss to rival South Carolina in which Uiagalelei completed just eight of 29 passes.
By this point, a hefty contingent of Clemson fans were outraged that the blue-chip freshman hadn’t taken over as QB1, but inside the locker room, the tenor was different.
Klubnik and Uiagalelei were tight, even rooming together on the road. The locker room was staunchly behind Uiagalelei, too, which made any change more difficult for the coaching staff. And for all of Klubnik’s potential, on most weeks, Uiagalelei simply practiced and played better, according to multiple sources inside the Clemson program.
“Me and DJ had a great relationship,” Klubnik said. “We still keep in touch a decent amount. I just tried to be his biggest supporter and make him the best he could be. When Coach made a change, he became that for me. People try to turn a bad eye or turn us against each other, but it was never like that.”
Truth is, Klubnik never pined for the starting job. He’d already learned the value of biding his time.
When Klubnik was in third grade, he’d met Nick Foles, a former Westlake quarterback. Kim Klubnik heard Foles would be attending a workout session in Austin, so she pulled Cade from school so her son could meet him. Years later, when Cade found himself involved in a three-way quarterback battle entering his sophomore year at Westlake, he emailed Foles for a little advice. Foles, who’d come off the bench and led the Philadelphia Eagles to a Super Bowl victory in the 2017 season, offered a lengthy reply imploring Klubnik to embrace his time as a backup.
Be the starter’s biggest fan, Foles said. Always take mental reps. Be patient. Learn.
Klubnik did as he was told, and by year’s end he’d helped Westlake to a state title.
At Clemson, he took the same approach, cheering on Uiagalelei and humbly sidestepping any questions about a quarterback controversy.
“I didn’t know if I was going to get to play in one week or in three years,” Klubnik said. “I just tried to stay confident in who I am and just learn, keep my head down and continue to work.”
That’s where Klubnik’s love for the game begins, his father said. It’s not that he didn’t want the starting job. It’s just that he didn’t mind biding his time because, for Klubnik, the time was still well spent.
“He loves the grind,” Tod Klubnik said. “It’s not that he doesn’t mind it. He loves it. He loves getting up early and working, staying late and watching film. He loves it. So last year, the whole year was the grind and getting better.”
On that dais after the ACC title game, Swinney admitted he’d actually thought Klubnik’s moment would come against Notre Dame. He’d played well in relief in the prior game, and he’d had an off-week to prep for the Irish.
This was all news to Klubnik. When Swinney made clear his freshman was the new face of the program less than an hour after the ACC championship game ended, it marked the first time Klubnik gave real thought to the job.
“I had so much trust in the coaches,” he said. “I came to Clemson for Coach Swinney and that staff to be a part of this culture, and with that is just trusting the coaches — whatever plan they had.”
IT WAS KLUBNIK’S low point of 2022 when he won over the locker room.
His first start for the Tigers came in last season’s Orange Bowl. It went poorly. He threw for 320 yards, but Clemson’s offense repeatedly bogged down in the red zone, Klubnik threw two picks and he was sacked four times. Tennessee won 31-14.
Klubnik took a beating in the game, but in the locker room he was upbeat. He hugged seniors who’d made their last appearance for Clemson. He promised better days to a group of players demoralized by the loss. He was mad about the outcome, too, though. That’s the thing that really came through, said Hunter Johnson, who’d spent the year as Clemson’s No. 3 quarterback.
“He took some shots, and he just kept going,” Johnson said. “After the game he was pretty beat, but it was obvious that didn’t matter to him. He just wanted to win that game.
“I was like, ‘OK, he’ll be a first-round pick, one of those guys who’s going to take Clemson all the way at some point.’ He’s just a winner. That’s just who he is.”
After the Orange Bowl, Swinney fired Streeter and brought in Garrett Riley to reinvigorate the offense. It was, as much as anything, an investment in Klubnik.
The new coach-QB pairing has been a good fit. If Klubnik oozes Swinney energy, he might have even more in common with Riley, a fellow Texan who exudes a palpable confidence that infects every corner of the locker room. Klubnik said the relationship has been a boon.
Uiagalelei transferred to Oregon State at year’s end, clearing the path for Klubnik to finally embrace his role as the centerpiece of Clemson’s locker room. It took a few months for him to become fully immersed in the role, but Swinney raved about Klubnik’s presence and leadership this summer.
A year ago, Klubnik wanted to be deferential in a locker room that had the utmost respect for the incumbent. Now, it’s Klubnik’s team, and it’s a role that suits him perfectly. He led offseason workouts, throws with his receivers constantly and even started a weekly Bible study for teammates at his apartment.
“I’m the leader, the player, the energy-bringer — back to normal me,” Klubnik said. “It’s been a heck of an offseason.”
Now, the job really begins.
Klubnik was happy to wait his turn last season. The time on the bench was never what bothered him. But he has won his whole life — not just games, but championships. That’s what drives him, and last year fell short of that benchmark.
“Last year, that was a good year,” he said. “But this year, we’ve got bigger goals.”
When Klubnik was in the eighth grade, his dad took him to see the Under Armour All-America Bowl in San Antonio. The boy was riveted. When they returned home, Cade taped his ticket stub to the mirror in his bedroom and made a promise: One day, he’d play in the game, too.
In 2022, he was named the game’s MVP.
As a freshman at Westlake, Klubnik was talking with teammates about the future and posed a question: What if Westlake won the next three state titles?
At the time, the Chaparrals had just one state championship in their history. With Klubnik at quarterback, however, they won in 2019, 2020 and again in 2021.
When Klubnik puts his mind to something, he wills it into reality. He still has a whiteboard he uses to track his goals. That’s where the national title sits now, an aspiration written in marker. But soon, more will be written. It has to be.
“Cade always says it’s not a dream,” his mother, Kim, said. “It’s a plan.”
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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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