The Yankees debuted a new style of baseball bat on March 28th, which added more wood to the barrel of the bat to increase the maximize players’ ability to hit the ball hard. Yankees players claimed this bat was invented by a MIT physicist, Aaron Leanhardt, with a handful of other teams having also tried the “torpedo” bats during Spring Training. 

During the weekend of March 28th, the Yankees scored a whopping 20 runs and 12 runs in two consecutive games against the Milwaukee Brewers. However, the Yankees’ season has leveled out. In their games between March 28th and April 16th, they scored no more than 10 runs in one game, which is not abnormal, as they scored over ten runs in nine games throughout the second half of the 2024 season and Spring Training for the 2025 season. In addition to their nine games with scores over ten runs, three of these games had scored equivilant to the second “torpedo” bat game against the Brewers.

Applying statistical tests to the Yankees’ performance proves that there is no significant improvement after the implementation of the “torpedo” bats. The Yankees batted a mean of 5.39 runs for their pre- “torpedo” bat Spring Training games, and a mean of 5.94 runs for their post- “torpedo” bat games. This mean is being raised by the outlier of their 20-run win against the Brewers, which was coincidentally the first time the “torpedo” bats were implemented. 

While it seemed that, at first, the “torpedo” bats were improving the Yankees’ performance, it is most likely that the improvement was simply due to the novelty of the “torpedo” bats, and once the players got used to them, their scores leveled back out.