Baseball physicists explain Torpille bats: NPR

If you were doing a bowling pin on a tower and suddenly decides to make a baseball bat instead, the result would look like the “Torpille bat” which talks about the new MLB season. After some New York Yankees used unusual bats to launch a circuit dam at the opening weekend, scientists who study baseball quickly noted.

“The same conception of bats has existed for a century and a half, perhaps,” explains Alan Nathan, professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. “And finding something new, for me, is always very exciting.”

Nathan and other experts say that they are fascinated that the beateering is above the shape of a piece of wood, the one that even the Baseball Rules Book calls a “stick”.

“There are simply not a lot of things you can do with this kind of thing,” Lloyd Smith, professor of mechanical engineering at the Washington State University, told NPR. He says he usually finds the wood a little boring – but he adds that in this case, “I was wrong.”

The logic behind the Torpille bats seems to be misleadingly simple: their bulbous shape comes from the analysis of the way the strikers tend to come into contact with the ball.

“If they come into contact in the same place in a barrel all the time, what can we do about the bat to try to give them better performance in this specific location?” said Dan Russell, professor of acoustics at the Penn State University.

Russell, Smith and Nathan were not involved in the design of new bats. But they have a long history of studying the functioning of baseball, including a collaboration studying illegal “bites” bats.

Torpille bats are legal, in accordance with MLB rule 3.02, which stipulates: “The bat must be a smooth round stick no more than 2.61 inches in diameter with the thickest part and no more than 42 inches in length.”

As for the weight, Babe Ruth used bats with more than 40 ounces – but the current standard is around 31 or 32 ounces, similar to the 33 ounces exercised by Hank Aaron, according to the Louisville Slugger Museum.

Torpille bat conceptions can reduce weight, a crucial component while hitting pitchers launch baseball balls faster than ever. So why has no one has already tried the baseball approach – a sport famous for their obsession with measures?

“The guy who had the idea, of course, has a training in physics,” explains Nathan. “This is why I am, in a way, I am jealous.”

The guy in question is Aaron Leanhardt, a former MIT physicist who has become an analyst of the Yankees and is now working for the Miami Marlins. It is recognized for having driven the new design.

Torpille bats have broken an “unwritten rule” in the design

To get an idea of ​​how a form of torpedo could help a paste, consider modern “cuts” bats, their barrels ending with a deep indentation rather than a rounded curve.

“It is an important weight” to be eliminated, says Smith. “It is at the end of the bat – it will be much more important than the weight near the handle. It makes the bat a little easier to oscillate.”

“You want to delete the weight where it does not do you good,” says Nathan. “Now, the next logical step is not only to remove the weight but to move it elsewhere. It is therefore the next logical step.”

To make this step, torpedo designers broke what Smith calls an unwritten rule: for decades, the diameter of a bat has essentially increased from the handle to a barrel, never decreasing before rounding up.

The Torpedo Bats diameters widen, but they shrink, bringing into play a number of dynamics. At an essential level, says Nathan, moving the weight of the end of the bat closer to the reduced hands “what is called the weight of swing or in technical language, the moment of inertia of the bat, which facilitates swing, easier to control”.

Another potential advantage, he adds, is that the design allows a bat to have a slightly wider diameter in the favorite location of a dough without adding to the swing weight.

“So the advantage is to have a larger surface on which to contact the ball,” he says.

But the design of the torpedoes does not necessarily translate into more power on the plate.

“If you lower the swing weight, you are increasing your swing speed”, which is “super important for the shot ball speed” and hitting the ball further down, says Smith. The compromise, he adds, is that by lowering the swing weight of a bat, “you swing the bat faster, but you have less mass to hit the ball.”

To imagine how it works, we have to visualize a hammer, according to Scott Drake, president of PFS-TECO, a wooden product company that inspects bats used in the MLB.

“If you could throw a hammer very quickly and get in touch with the ball to the head, it will go very far,” explains Drake. Of course, it would be difficult to swing a hammer with so much speed and precision.

If you slide the weight in the handle to your hands, he says, it becomes easier and easier to swing faster – “But when you enter into contact at the end, there is less and less mass to contact you.”

“For the average person, what it means is that if you lower the swing weight of a bat, your shot ball speed drops a little,” said Smith.

Of course, major leagues strikers are not average people. But it should be noted that on the nine Yankees circuits last Saturday, three were affected by Aaron Judge – using his normal and not affected bat.

Russell, Smith and Nathan say that they are impatient to carry out tests on new bats to see how they balance these competing factors-and how the design affects the “sweet spot” of a bat, where the collision of the bat and the ball is the most effective.

So, do bats give the strikers an advantage?

“I don’t think it strikes the ball faster,” said Russell about the Torpille bat. But, with the potential gains in bat control, he and his colleagues believe that bats could stimulate a less measurable factor: the confidence of the strikers.

“The baseball game is so superstitious,” said Russell. “Whatever the thing, if you have found something that makes you more confident, it will work.”

This dynamic extends from the shot box to the mound, where the pitches are likely to see more strikers holding strangely swollen bats.

“I’m sure the launchers say,” What is this thing? “” Russell says.

While the Yankees draw the big titles to use the Torpille bats, the players of at least eight MLB teams tried bats, from Chicago Cubs to the Rays of Tampa Bay in stick training, training in the spring or the regular season. Several of the 41 suppliers of approved bats of baseball make them versions, from Louisville Slugger and Victus to Chandler and authentic.

“If all the manufacturers do not already do them, I am sure they will be soon,” says Russell.