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Welcome back to MoneyCall, The Athletic’s weekly sports business cheat sheet. Name-dropped today: Elly De La Cruz, Aaron Leanhardt, Serena Williams, Ted Sarandos, Olivia Miles, Cooper Flagg, Coastal Carolina, Trae Young, JuJu Watkins, Ernest Hemingway and more. Let’s go:
Driving the Conversation: Two big questions about MLB’s ‘torpedo’ bats
Similar to how Hemingway described bankruptcy in “The Sun Also Rises,” innovation in sports — especially baseball — happens “gradually, then suddenly.”
- Once the low-payroll A’s use a spreadsheet to walk into the playoffs, everyone else creates their version.
- Barry Bonds crushes with maple bats, rather than the traditional ash, and everyone goes maple (until birch supersedes maple).
- Analytically edgy teams deploy “the shift.” The shift gets banned for being too effective.
And now? The so-called torpedo bat.
The mania began over opening weekend: Nine home runs from the Yankees on Saturday by way of a subtly freaky-looking bat shaped somewhat like a torpedo (or, to be less catchy but more accurate, a bowling pin).
The simple explanation from Yankees beat writer Brendan Kuty:
“The bats differ from traditional models due to their torpedo shape, which comes from redistributing its weight so that the most dense part, or the ‘sweet spot,’ is closer to the handle.”
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Players are intrigued. Reds star Elly De La Cruz tried it Monday and crushed the ball. One bat-maker contends Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton’s seven-HR barrage in last year’s playoffs was with a torpedo.
The early version of the backstory is amazing: An MIT physicist-turned-baseball coach, Aaron Leanhardt, made an observation:
“Maybe the eureka moment really was when players started to point to where they were trying to hit the ball and they noticed themselves that it was not the fattest part of the bat. They noticed themselves that the tip was the fattest part of the bat and everyone just looked at each other like, ‘Well, let’s flip it around. It’s going to look silly, but are we willing to go with it?’”
Because the torpedo is so unexpected, so visual, so obvious in its impact and just plain quirky, it is the innovation story of the year (so far!) in sports. Bat-makers are rushing to fill demand.
OK, so two questions:
How did no one think of this before? In a sport that spends a gajillion dollars and people hours on finding the most incremental, infinitesimal edges, no one in a front office ever thought, “Hey, let’s change the shape of the bat so that the most effective surface area might hit the ball more often?” Apparently not — although these bats have been around for at least a few years.
Will it last? Sports leagues and governing organizations react to unexpected innovation in two ways: Either they quash it (the shift) or it indelibly alters the sport (“Moneyball”).
The torpedo falls within (current) MLB bat regulations, and the result is that every at-bat with a torpedo is now getting our attention. I would call that a home run for the league.
Get Caught Up: Miles eschews draft, NFL’s flag football opportunity and more news
Big talkers from the sports business industry:
- Olivia Miles spurns WNBA: The Notre Dame star would have been the No. 2 pick in the 2025 draft; instead, she is in the transfer portal for another year of college hoops. The economic argument to stay in school rather than head to the W is well-known. But the league and players’ union are expected to change that dynamic in the next CBA, which takes effect in 2026.
- NFL all in on flag football — and Serena is, too: A key MoneyCall thesis is that flag football is going to be huge in 2025 and beyond. Caitlin Clark and Serena Williams spoke to NFL owners Sunday about the potential for the sport, Roger Goodell talked it up with the media yesterday and Serena turned around and submitted a bid to invest in the league’s flag football efforts, per FOS. So much more on this coming soon.
- NFL x NFLX, The Sequel: In front of NFL owners this week, Roger Goodell and Netflix’s Ted Sarandos announced the streamer will be back for two more Christmas Day games after last year’s smashing success (plus a Christmas night game on Amazon Prime Video, because the holiday falls on a Thursday, within Amazon’s rights package).Related: The Chiefs want the league to make them a permanent fixture on Christmas, like the Lions and Cowboys on Thanksgiving, per The Athletic’s Nate Taylor and Daniel Popper.
- “NBA Europe”: Lots still to be figured out, but the gist is the NBA sees new revenue in European basketball, and EuroLeague seems pretty powerless to stop them from jumping in. I think the going rate for 50 percent team ownership (the NBA is keeping the other half … for now) is going to be much higher than most expect.
- NBA players as college GMs: Steph Curry started this trend a few weeks ago, and Trae Young has jumped in, becoming assistant GM of Oklahoma basketball (along with the requisite donation to the program’s NIL fund, reportedly to the tune of $1M). “Assistant GM” is the new “executive producer.”
Other current obsessions: The NHL’s $7.7B Canadian media deal with Rogers … Sacramento fans not quite knowing how to feel about the A’s … “What next?” for Deion Sanders … my colleague Chris Weatherspoon’s forensic looks at Premier League team finances … “Tush push” discourse … the Ovi Tracker …
TA Edge: What I’m wondering about free concessions
Coastal Carolina announced it will offer free concessions at football games: unprecedented in college and pro sports.
My colleague David Ubben dropped the news into our college football reporting team’s Slack about 10 seconds before I was about to, so I wondered what he thought of this. Here’s David:
💬 “In an era of college sports where athletic departments are asking more and more of fans — donate more for facilities, donate more for tickets so we can make up for revenue sharing, donate more to our collective to pay players — they’re offering up less and less for that money.
“Practices are closed. Spring games are being canceled. Access to players is minimal, and getting to know them is impossible if they even stick around more than a year.
“It’s nice to see at least one school thinking about the fans who won’t ever have their name on a building on campus and improving the fan experience without asking for anything in return. It might pay off for them in the long run.”
This policy is about as fan-friendly as it gets. If/when increased ticket-sales numbers come in, expect more college teams to adopt this idea.
Grab Bag💰
Time for a lightning round.
Just asking questions
Despite Duke’s team-wide apparel deal with Nike, could the program (or the NCAA) really do anything about it if Cooper Flagg insisted on wearing sneakers made by his sponsor New Balance on the court Saturday in the Final Four?
What are they going to do: Sit him? Sue him? Come on — neither. Flagg won’t be the trailblazer, but someone else will be.
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“The scenario you describe is real and will not be hypothetical for long,” Michael O’Hara Lynch, former global head of sponsorship marketing at Visa, told me via email. “It’s inevitable! No question in my mind that some player will soon test the school’s ability to dictate what shoes they wear on the court, as well as other products/services they are now endorsing (drinks on the sidelines, etc.).”
Time to Know: 8:50 p.m. ET
That’s the new-for-2025 tip time for the men’s NCAA Tournament championship game Monday on CBS, notable for being 30 minutes earlier than in prior years. Fans and media have been calling for this for decades. Enjoy your earlier “One Shining Moment” montage.
Data Point: 93.4% / 90.6%
The percentiles of my men’s and women’s brackets, nationally, good for fourth place in our MoneyCall March contest on the men’s side and third on the women’s. 😎 (Special recognition coming next Wednesday to our winners.)
Got 10 minutes?
We have reached the 13th edition of MoneyCall! Huge thanks to everyone for reading, sharing and engaging. How are we doing? If you have 10 minutes, please take this survey and let us know.
Beat Dan in Connections: Sports Edition
Puzzle #191
🔵🔵🔵🔵
🟡🟡🟡🟡
🟢🟢🟢🟢
🟣🟣🟣🟣
⏱️ 00:41
Tricky in a fun way. Try the game here!
Worth Your Time
Tennis reaches media inflection point: This is the single best piece I have read digging into the tenuous relationship between tennis and media, the dynamics constraining the sport’s visibility and the obvious audience opportunities its various governing organizations need to actualize. Cannot recommend that read more.
Two more:
(Top photo: Brad Penner / Imagn Images)
This news was originally published on this post .
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