Jazz Chisholm explains Yankees’ new torpedo bats after three-home run weekend

The New York Yankees began their season in style with an opening weekend sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers, and they did so by bombing away, hitting an outrageous 15 homers and scoring 36 runs over the three-game series. 

Aaron Judge led the way with four long balls, but right behind him was Jazz Chisholm with three and Anthony Volpe with two. The performance from Chisholm and Volpe drew a ton of attention because they were swinging a new-look bat designed by the Yankees that fans immediately had questions about. 

The “torpedo bat” Chisholm and Volpe wielded to such great success features a thicker barrel and then tapers back down at the end. The idea is that by moving the denser part of the wood further down you increase the amount of opportunities for the batter to hit the ball on the barrel. Many fans (and some Brewers pitchers) questioned the legality of the bat, but so long as the barrel is not thicker than 2.61 inches at any point, it would seem to fall within MLB’s rules regarding bat design. 

Yankees players using new bat style: Explaining ‘torpedo’ shape and why it appears to be legal under MLB rules

Mike Axisa

The explanation from Michael Kay on the Yankees broadcast stated the Yankees found players were hitting the ball more off the label than the barrel, so they moved the denser portion of the wood towards the label. That confused his broadcast partners who asked if they were purposefully trying to jam themselves, and Chisholm took to social media on Monday to clear the air on the bat design and explain what’s really happening. 

If it had been explained this simply from the beginning on the YES Network broadcast, we probably wouldn’t have even gotten a controversy out of this. Instead, it was treated as some great mystery, which will always make fans cry foul (especially when it’s the Yankees doing this). Chisholm lays out very succinctly how the bat design works and corrects Kay’s insinuation that they tried to move the barrel more to the label. In the simplest terms, the Yankees moved more wood to the part of the bat you use (the barrel) and removed it from where you don’t want to hit the ball (the very end of the bat), but did so by staying within MLB’s bat guidelines. 

On top of being a very good second baseman, Chisholm could provide some additional value to the Yankees by writing their press releases, because in four sentences he explained this entire thing better than just about anyone has yet.