Mustang rally? SMU got what it wanted, but will the ACC move mean a return to glory?
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Dave Wilson, ESPN Staff Writer
DALLAS — Early Friday morning, SMU received a phone call decades in the making, a lifeline from the ACC offering them a return to the upper echelons of college football.
It was a proud day for the Mustangs, with an afternoon celebration in the school’s indoor practice facility. Confetti fell from the sky. The pep band played “Great Balls of Fire” as boosters mingled, shared hugs and high-fives nearly 40 years after becoming one of the most vilified college football programs in college football history.
“We’re finally back where we belong,” said David Miller, the chairman of SMU’s board of trustees, receiving a standing ovation.
The NCAA’s 1987 “death penalty” for repeated recruiting violations wrecked the football program, as the strings holding together the Southwest Conference started to fray. After football returned to SMU in 1989, the Mustangs won just 13 games over the final seven years of the SWC. In 1995, when the new Big 12 merged four teams from the SWC — Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech and Baylor — with the Big 8, SMU was left to start over again. And again (in the WAC) and again (in Conference USA) and again (in the Big East, which didn’t materialize and turned into the American).
A proud program that finished in the top 10 three times between 1981 and 1984, including a No. 2 finish in 1982, hasn’t finished a single season in the AP rankings since then.
And yet, the Mustangs willed themselves into the ACC. Despite its modest enrollment (7,056 undergrads in fall 2022), a decades-long lack of high-level football success, and a frustrating lack of fan support, SMU’s athletics ambition is still bigger’n Dallas, as the Texas saying goes.
They did it by making the ACC a deal it couldn’t resist: They’d join the conference without taking any money from the league’s television deal for up to nine years, according to sources. But why? And how?
“I’m gonna leave some mystery around all that. I don’t think it’s as simple as people want to make it out to be,” athletic director Rick Hart said Friday of the revenue concessions. “You can’t forgo something you don’t have. We’re not going to take a step back resource-wise, even from a conference perspective. So this is all positive. … We’ve got an underdog mentality. We’ve got a chip on our shoulder. We’ve had to do more with less for a long time.”
Cal and Stanford, joining along with SMU, will each receive a 30% share of ACC payouts. The three schools’ withholdings will create an annual allotment of revenue between $50 million and $60 million. Some will be divided proportionally among the 14 full-time members plus Notre Dame (a league member in everything but football), and there will also be money set aside for performance incentives. Officials said there is also conference distribution of other leaguewide splits such as College Football Playoff or NCAA tournament revenue. In short, the Mustangs believe that there is money to be had if they win.
And they think they will. SMU’s Boulevard Collective is one of the most generous NIL programs in the country, reportedly paying all football and men’s basketball athletes $36,000 a year, according to On3. Gerald J. Ford Stadium is currently undergoing a $100 million expansion, part of a $300 million investment in new athletic facilities in the past decade.
“You already do everything like a Power 5 school,” Miller said he was told in realignment discussions.
So school officials believe there’s no risk in taking a big swing. The Mustangs have been left behind for 30 years. They knew this was a last shot before conferences continued to unravel. With a possible superconference era on the horizon, the Mustangs are locked into a conference that has 13 years left on its television contract and will have a chance to get up to speed before whatever happens next.
The challenge is that they’ll come in as one of the smaller athletic departments in the country. SMU will become just the fifth Power 5 school — joining new conference-mate Syracuse, along with Wisconsin, Iowa State and Colorado — not to field a baseball program. It will join Miami and Wake Forest as ACC schools without softball. SMU’s stadium seats 32,000, just 500 more than Wake Forest’s Truist Field, the smallest venue in the league, but has the capability to expand to 45,000.
The ACC as a whole wouldn’t mind if SMU becomes another small private school that is a football doormat. The league will get the money, and its College Football Playoff contenders have one more team to beat. It’s on SMU to prove them wrong.
The school’s NIL program likely benefits from SMU’s former reputation as the original NIL school. Now it’s all wide open.
Hence, Miller told ESPN that he thinks the Mustangs have a lot to sell with a program on the rise.
“I don’t think it would be a stretch to say that there’s some people out there that weren’t excited about the notion that SMU was going to be uplifted back to Power 5 status,” Miller said, hinting at a few Texas universities. “Think about what it’s going to do for our recruiting. We already recruit extremely well. The only thing that anybody could ever use against us in a recruiting battle is the fact that we’re not Power 5.”
Paul Loyd Jr., one of the Mustangs’ biggest football benefactors — the Paul B. Loyd Jr. All Sports Center is SMU athletics’ office hub — was a member of SMU’s 1966 SWC championship team and a team captain in ’67, and thinks their new status will help them become more competitive.
“I feel pretty good about us getting up to speed pretty fast. It’s really a lot easier to build a team now than it used to be,” he said. “Obviously we’ve gotten some really good players. You look at the players starting for us now, a lot of them weren’t here a year ago. You have the more established football powers like Clemson and Florida State that we have to compete with, but other than that, I think it’s a pretty wide open contest. Everybody’s gonna believe they have a good shot at it.”
He noted that it will make it easier to retain coaches as well. The Mustangs’ two previous coaches, Chad Morris and Sonny Dykes, both were lured away by Power 5 jobs.
Realignment has been a difficult road for many teams. Only TCU and Utah have won consistently since moving up the ladder.
The Frogs’ ascent was painful to watch from Dallas. Just 40 miles away, TCU climbed from the same abyss, with Dennis Franchione turning the program around before Gary Patterson elevated it, claiming six top-10, finishes in a 10-year span including winning a Rose Bowl, one of the greatest achievements by a Group of 5 team in the sport’s history. Since they were called up to the Big 12 in 2012, TCU has made $500 million in donor-funded athletics facilities upgrades.
When Patterson and TCU decided to part ways, they lured Dykes, who guided TCU to a Fiesta Bowl win and an appearance in the College Football Playoff national championship game in Year 1.
SMU says its major projects were in the works before Dykes’ departure. But it surely galvanized Mustangs boosters, seeing a coach who embraced Dallas, brought D/FW players home via the transfer portal, and won 10 games for the first time in 40 years, only to lose him to their rivals. Coincidentally or not, alumnus Garry Weber’s $50 million donation for the new end zone project — the largest athletic gift in SMU’s history — was announced 21 days after Dykes left for TCU.
Now SMU will become the state’s sixth Power 5 program — there’s been a concerted effort to call it “the only D/FW school in a top-three conference,” which makes for extra spice in its century-old Iron Skillet rivalry with TCU — and the pressure will be on to capitalize in the same way.
SMU has long struggled to get fans to games, something that has plagued the school for decades since the Dallas Cowboys arrived and due to its small enrollment and alumni base and location in a major city with lots of competition.
“If we can’t ultimately fill our own stadium, we’re out of business,” SMU president Jim Zumberg said in 1978, after Rice-SMU drew 6,918 to the Cotton Bowl.
Zumberg hired Russ Potts as athletic director to fix lagging attendance. Potts’ strategy, called “Mustang Mania,” was to basically give tickets away. In 1979, Rice-SMU drew 60,217 at Texas Stadium.
“We discounted the discounts,” Brad Thomas, who ran the school’s promotions department, told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram in 1982. “Then we’d discount the discounted discount tickets.”
Last year, including a record 35,569 fans for Dykes’ return with TCU, SMU’s average attendance was 24,971 — which would rank 13th in the current ACC, about 500 fans ahead of last-place Duke. On Saturday, the day after the ACC announcement, the Mustangs drew 21,490 for the season opener against Louisiana Tech.
But in the best of times, like when Eric Dickerson was setting SWC rushing records, No. 2 SMU vs. No. 9 Arkansas drew 65,000 to Texas Stadium.
For Loyd, that’s another reason to go big. He believes SMU needs to be back at the top of the football world to get Dallas fans re-energized, and believes when marquee teams like Clemson or Florida State come to town, it will attract more than just SMU fans. He compared trading games against Texas and Arkansas and A&M for East Carolina and Charlotte to Major League Baseball, playing the Yankees and Red Sox, then becoming a minor-league team.
“A Triple-A team might be great for Wichita Falls, but it isn’t for Dallas, Texas,” Loyd said. “I don’t think getting that back will be difficult. Now if we go out there and lose every game, it’s gonna be difficult. But I think we’re able to compete and win and be in the championship race every year.”
The Big 12 didn’t want the Ponies. The Pac-12 evaporated just as it started getting interested in the discussion. Now the Mustangs landed a dream spot in the ACC, Miller’s desired location. The 6-foot-8 former SMU basketball player who helped lead the Mustangs to a 1972 Southwest Conference championship will get to sit courtside at Moody Coliseum and watch Duke and North Carolina play on David B. Miller Court.
At the celebration Friday, the front rows were filled with several older boosters who had lived the entire cycle of despair and hope on the Hilltop. They’ve made it their mission to restore the Mustangs to the top before their time is up. Miller and his wife Carolyn have donated more than $100 million to SMU over the years, according to The Dallas Morning News, including a $50 million donation to the business school. This is a personal mission for many of them.
“There were a bunch of guys in that room that not only played football and basketball, but that won championships in the ’50s and ’60s and ’70s,” Miller said. “It’s a proud part of your personal history. Then we had to go through such a difficult time period where not only did we not really have success on the playing field or the basketball arena, but we were stuck at any level that we just didn’t feel like we belonged in.”
So the Mustangs did it by telling the ACC they didn’t need their money. But Loyd said this wasn’t the kind of Texas bravado you might expect from a Texas oilman (he and Miller both made their millions in the energy sector). Instead, he said, it was the opposite.
“We’re coming in as humble pie as one can get,” Loyd said. “We’re the beggars, not the choosers. … A lot of people did a lot of hard work, but this is a good stroke of luck for SMU and this would be the quintessential case of looking a gift horse in the mouth.”
Miller spent time flying all over the country to try to meet with his counterparts at other schools to sell the Mustangs. He admits SMU was slow to recover from the NCAA scandal, when the president and 90% of the board of trustees resigned, calling the university a “rudderless ship” that was “brought to its knees” by the humiliation.
“I think it’s a very healing moment,” Turner, SMU’s president who arrived in 1995 in the final year of the SWC, said of the ACC invitation. “There’s still a lot of resentment about that as well as hurt feelings. This is sort of like a new beginning. It’s a fresh start. It’s an affirmation that the university’s athletic programs have come back.”
Hart said at the celebration ceremony that the Mustangs have a lot of work to do. The stadium is still under construction. There will be a lot more money to raise, tickets to sell and a lot of infrastructure work to do. It’s time to Pony Up.
But Miller is confident that the glory days will return to Dallas again.
“The beast is about to emerge,” Miller said. “Just wait.”
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.
Sports
‘It’s taken on a life of its own’: Inside the 48 hours torpedo bats launched into baseball lore
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.
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.
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