Demand for torpedo bats is booming for batmakers

Baseball bat manufacturers had little evidence to suggest a spike in sales was just around the corner when Major League Baseball’s newest season opened last week.

Baseball bat manufacturers had little evidence to suggest a spike in sales was just around the corner when Major League Baseball’s newest season opened last week.

It had been four years since physicists working for MLB teams had begun chatting with Louisville Slugger about how to increase the exit velocity of batted balls. Those conversations helped create a shape — resembling a bowling pin, with a thicker middle and a tapered barrel — that the company first turned into a real, wood bat in November 2023. Four teams contacted Louisville Slugger about the model, but when the so-called torpedo bat was introduced around big-league clubhouses last season, adoption was hardly widespread.

On the eve of the new season, less than 10% of MLB hitters using bats made by Marucci Sports were using the so-called torpedo model, said Kurt Ainsworth, the company’s chief executive. “When you’re a baseball player, you’re used to some looking down the bat and it looks one way,” Ainsworth said. “And then you see it, it looks kind of funny. Like, ‘I don’t really need that.’”

That stance changed last weekend when the bats erupted into the public's attention — and with them, overnight big business. Ainsworth estimated that half of Marucci-affiliated hitters have now tried a torpedo model and said he expects that to increase to 80% by month’s end.

“All I can say,” said Bobby Hillerich, a vice president of manufacturing and operations for Hillerich and Bradsby Co., the maker of Louisville Slugger bats, “is that it’s crazy.”

https://www.nbcnews.com/sports/mlb/demand-torpedo-bats-booming-batmakers-rcna199621

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