The Torpedo Bat and Other Complaints

This one’s about the media, easy stories and the surprisingly entertaining history of baseball bats…

If you’re a baseball fan and even if you’re not you’ve probably heard about “Torpedo Bats” because the media loves easy stories that require a minimum amount of research which is the approximate amount of work most news organizations put into this one.

So my complaint isn’t actually about Torpedo Bats, it’s about the media’s coverage of Torpedo Bats because the media (a professional fraternity I’ve been kicked out of on three separate occasions) loses its mind at the drop of a bat (and puns like that one might demonstrate why the media decided they could live without me) because they want to grab your attention so everything has to be “THE BEST!” or “THE WORST!” or, if the first two aren’t applicable:

“THIS CHANGES EVERYTHING!”

As bad as 9/11 was, when a national magazine (and I forget which one) had a cover headlined “THE END OF LAUGHTER” I knew they were full of crap and overstating the case to be dramatic and grab peoples’ attention. I don’t know about you, but I have in fact laughed several times since September 11^th, 2001 and since that awful day some standup comedians have actually gotten laughs with 9/11 jokes which means Austrian poet Rainer Maria Wilke was right when he wrote:

“No feeling is final.”

Which is a good thing to remember next time your heart is broken or your team wins the Final Four or you’re writing magazine cover headlines.

In any case…

When you do a daily TV show or sports talk radio show or write a daily column you need things to talk and speculate about and needing an endless supply of material, the media have now latched on to the Torpedo Bat which looks like this…

Y’know, now that I look at that picture, it looks a lot more like a bowling pin…

Than a torpedo…

But people wouldn’t be nearly as excited about “Bowling Pin Bats” because “Torpedo Bats” sounds way cooler and if you don’t think names matter, the Datsun 240Z was originally called the Nissan Fairlady Z, but they changed the name for international sales because American males are insecure and thought driving a “Fairlady Z” would make them seem Gay.

I’m almost positive it’s liking to have sex with people of the same sex that makes you seem Gay, but I’m not an expert so go ahead and come up with your own theories involving musical theater, show tunes and Speedo swim trunks.

And now – however reluctantly – back to baseball and Torpedo Bats.

The Torpedo Bat barrel (the fattest part) has been moved closer to the knob (the part by your hands) and Baseball Fan Boys – the guys who get erections while looking at box scores, which doesn’t make them Gay, it just makes them nerds – have gone batshit and asked why hasn’t anybody thought of this before which ignores the fact that baseball bats have always been changing.

Bat makers have thought of a lot of things before and the Torpedo Bat is just one of them.

That’s Ty Cobb’s bat which is built along the same lines as your average Presto Log (according to the internet; 34.5 inches long and weighed 42 ounces) because back then getting the ball in play and hitting it where defenders weren’t playing was the priority, but when you swing a bat that heavy you won’t have much bat speed:

Now here’s Babe Ruth’s bat (36 inches, 44 ounces) and Babe decided he’d like a skinnier handle and more weight down at the end of the bat and swung out his ass at every pitch he saw and some that he didn’t.

Before Babe Ruth, home runs were considered anomalies, possibly because it was the Dead Ball Era (baseballs were softer) and in 1913 the Home Run Champion was a guy named “Home Run” Baker who led the American League with 12 which lets you know just how few home runs you had to hit back then to make an impression and get a cool nickname.

In 1920 Babe Ruth led the AL in home runs with 54 and baseball realizes fans love homers so they introduce the Live Ball (it was harder) and everyone starts copying Ruth because he’s getting rich and famous by swinging out his ass, so they do that too and home runs and strikeouts go way up. Ty Cobb (who had some pretty obnoxious opinions) thought Ruth ruined baseball because it went from a game of singles, strategy and teamwork, to one guy, standing at the plate, swinging for the fences and Ty wasn’t totally wrong about that, but for God’s Sake, don’t get him started on Black people.

Also…

Pitchers started throwing hard all the time which they didn’t always do until there was a runner in scoring position – remember, home runs weren’t a big deal yet – which is part of why they could pitch so many innings back then and in 1914 Walter Johnson threw 371.2 innings and had a record of 28-18, started 40 games and appeared in 11 more and if a manager asked a pitcher to do that today he’d be accused of human rights violations.

OK, so now pitchers are blowing gas and hitters are swinging bats with skinny handles and the weight down at the end and someone gets the idea of “cupping” a bat to make it less heavy so you could swing that bat quicker and cupping got popular in the 1970s and looks like this…

Interesting point recently made by a bat expert they mistakenly put on the MLB channel because he totally screwed up their Torpedo Bat narrative…

Under-informed people are saying the very end of the bat isn’t useful, so why not move the thick part closer to the hands and the bat expert disagreed: even if you don’t intentionally use it for contact, the end of the bat adds to the bat’s mass and that mass adds to the ball’s exit velocity, so cupping might not be the panacea everybody thought it was and I think this conclusively proves “facts” and “science” can fuck up a good story which is probably why the Trump Administration doesn’t use them.

Next, people start using maple instead of ash (emerald ash borers – and I can’t believe some minor league team hasn’t used that name – were damaging ash trees so ash was getting scarcer) and sometimes it’s hard to get good wood which is why the porn industry employs “fluffers.”

(OK, we may be off-track here and we’ll pause for a moment while you google “fluffers”— and now you probably ought to delete your search history.)

Bat makers have also tried hickory and birch and beech, but these days it’s mainly ash and maple and maple is harder and lighter than ash, which sounds great until you get jammed by an inside fastball and your maple bat doesn’t crack, it explodes like a hand grenade because maple is also more brittle.

Side note:

In 1976 Dodger catcher Steve Yeager is standing in the on-deck circle when teammate Bill Russell’s bat shatters and the jagged end of the bat hits Yeager in the throat, piercing his esophagus and coming centimeters from killing him and after that Yeager attached a throat protector to his catcher’s mask and every catcher who didn’t want to get hit in the throat by a foul tip copies him, which is how catcher’s masks went from looking like this…

To looking like this…

(And now you have yet another baseball factoid nobody sane wants to hear, but if that bores them you can always tell them about “fluffers.”)

Then there were axe-handled bats which showed up in 1990 and looked like this…

Now here’s an article about axe-handled bats written in 2017 that said they were better bats and would change the game and improve performance and cut down on injuries and produce peace in our time and absolutely everybody was going to start using them, but turns out none of that happened:

https://scienceworld.scholastic.com/issues/2016-17/050817/a-better-bat.html?language=english#1190L

OK, so people have been screwing around with bats forever and desperate hitters will try anything. For a while, ballplayers were wearing wristbands that had magnets embedded in them and when I asked a player why, he said: “They’re supposed to improve balance”

I replied: “Then shouldn’t you be wearing them on both wrists?”

When you get desperate, logic doesn’t have a whole lot to do with what happens next and if you don’t believe me ask anyone who’s gone through a divorce.

For a very short time in my life I sold skis and knew a fair amount about ski construction and doctors and lawyers with too much money wanted the “best” skis (AKA: the most expensive ones) even though the most expensive skis were stiff racing skis which were designed to be used when “hauling ass” – a technical racing term – and the doctors and lawyers would never ski that fast so the skis would be hard to turn, but they bought them anyway.

You can definitely choose skis or bats that are best for your style of skiing or hitting, but my Real Life observation on the ski slopes led me to the conclusion that guys who could really really ski could ski on anything and guys who couldn’t, couldn’t, no matter what type of ski they were standing on.

Hall of Famer Tony Gwynn used a 32-inch bat that weighed 31 ounces (he later went to 30.5 as he got older and lots of hitters use lighter bats as the season progresses and they get tired) and I’m pretty sure if you gave Tony Gwynn a table leg to swing he’d still hit .338.

BTW:

When Tony was playing in college he used a metal bat called a Tennessee Thumper, but when he started playing professionally he had to use wood bats which he didn’t like because they were too heavy. So he goes to a sporting goods store in Walla Walla, Washington and the only wood bat he can find that feels like a Thumper is a kid’s bat, but when he shows up at the ballpark with that undersized bat, his teammates laugh at him.

Then Tony hits .332 with a .612 slugging percentage and his teammates start asking: “So where was this store again?”

But as Spike Lee discovered, it ain’t the shoes; it’s the guy wearing them.

Everybody got excited about when the Yankees hit a bunch of home runs the first weekend of the season and the media (who as we’ve already established, likes simplistic stories and especially likes stories about teams in New York or LA) credited the Yankees “Torpedo Bats,” but guess who currently leads the Yankees and all of baseball in home runs and doesn’t use a Torpedo Bat:

Players and bat-makers have been screwing around with bats forever and we haven’t even touched on “corking” a bat (drilling a hole down through the center of the bat and filling it with cork or super balls, which is definitely illegal) or “boning” a bat (using a cow bone to compress the bat’s wood, theoretically making the wood denser and harder and “boning” is not illegal, but still sounds way worse than “corking”).

Hitters will try anything and everything including voodoo (just watch Major League) and someone somewhere is probably trying to improve his bat’s performance by using a laser beam or a time machine or soaking his bat in virgin olive oil (although from what I’ve seen in baseball, “ho” olive oil might be more appropriate) and teams have actually had their bats blessed by a Catholic priest, so if you’re playing a game of pickup baseball, you should definitely choose the Pope, but stick him in right field because I hear his legs are gone.

Bottom Line

You could let me swing a tennis racket and I still couldn’t hit major league pitching and maybe the Torpedo Bat is here to stay and maybe it’s a passing fad –we’ll know more by the end of the season – but you still need extraordinary hand-eye coordination to make solid contact between ball and barrel (no matter where that barrel is located) and the guys who can do that will hit with anything and the guys who can’t won’t.