• by Mark Payne , Yesterday

The torpedo bat debate playing out this spring has been as refreshing as a whiff of freshly mowed grass, and a welcome respite from all the head-spinning headlines. As it brings together three of my favorite things -- innovation, baseball, and woodworking -- I can’t help but weigh in here, to draw out the inspiration and lessons for innovators everywhere.

First, a bit of background: Aaron Leanhardt, an MIT. grad working as an assistant hitting coach in the Yankees organization, came up with a newfangled bat design. Shaped like a torpedo, it puts more of the wood mass in the part of the barrel hitters call the sweet spot, that magic point where solid contact launches a ball faster and further. It also shifts the bat’s weight closer to hitters’ hands, which, in MIT-speak, reduces the moment of inertia. In plain English, that means faster bat speed.

The start of the 2025 season saw torpedo-armed hitters launching home runs at a striking  pace, stirring an instant debate. Purists cried “Heresy!,” saying the new bat was unfair to pitchers, that it compensates for the bad habits of hitters who should know better -- and that it’s an unwelcome assault on baseball’s hallowed history, where the stats of bygone eras are revered like Babylonian artifacts.

Torpedo fans have pushed back, arguing that pitchers have previously used deep analytics, biomechanics and new training tech (and, yes, illegal sticky stuff) to add velocity and spin to the ball. Advances in pitching have sent league-wide batting averages down, and strikeout totals soaring over the past twenty years.

“Hallelujah!” said the torpedo bat advocates. Finally, the hitters have hit back with an innovation of their own.

What’s my take? Unleash the torpedoes. Innovation is good. Bring it on, and let the torpedo debate remind innovators everywhere of a few precious tenets:

If you look hard enough, EVERYTHING in life has room for innovation -- even something as ancient as baseball, or as rigidly codified in a rule book as a smooth round wooden stick no more than 2.61 inches wide and 42 inches long.

Yes, the innovative mind really does love constraints. In this case, there were two: the “round wooden stick” with its range of allowable dimensions, and what Leanhardt called “the wood budget.” Bat weight is very personal to a hitter. Most MLB hitters prefer something between 30 and 33 ounces. Only dense, heavy woods like ash and maple are up to the task, so lighter material wasn’t an option to increase the sweet spot mass. Redistribution of that fixed wood budget through an innovative shape was really Leanhardt’s only option.

The value of innovation isn’t just measured in what the innovation actually does. It’s also about what it does to our heads. Hitting a baseball is one of the hardest acts in sports; the best hitters fail seven times out of ten. Anything that makes a hitter believe they can hit better can help them hit better. For all the changes the steroid era brought to batters’ bodies, many say the biggest change was confidence -- a feeling of invincibility. The greatest value of a health tracker wearable like the Oura Ring may not be the data it captures, but the way it keeps our health top of mind as we make choices day in and day out.