Fantasy baseball: Torpedo the excitement in MLB's bat trend - ESPN

In hitting a franchise-record nine home runs on March 29, including becoming the first team in MLB history to homer on the first three pitches they saw, the New York Yankees didn't merely torpedo the Milwaukee Brewers' team ERA. They bowled over the fantasy baseball landscape with the latest, greatest, «seeking a sneaky analytic advantage» trend that has been the talk of our game through the season's first six days.

Yes, my friends, torpedo bats are all the rage.

So far, 13 different hitters have been reported to be regularly using these new bats, which are designed to bring much of the barrel closer to the label (or sweet spot) of the bat, through the entirety of the season's opening week: Cody Bellinger, Junior Caminero, Jazz Chisholm Jr., Paul Goldschmidt, Nico Hoerner, Ryan Jeffers, Francisco Lindor, Adley Rutschman, Davis Schneider, Dansby Swanson, Jose Trevino, Anthony Volpe and Austin Wells.

The idea for these 13, and anyone else who adopts these new bats in the coming days, is that the tweak in bat construction can only help elevate a player's quality of contact. Yankees slugger Giancarlo Stanton, who has posted a 99th percentile Statcast average exit velocity in five of his past seven qualified seasons and at least 96th percentile in all seven, is a widely cited example, having used the bats during the 2024 postseason while hitting seven home runs in 14 games.

Yes, the standard «small sample size» caveat applies. Still, this new-to-2025 baker's dozen of batters has shown a marked change in offensive production so far, slugging 84 points higher this year than in 2024 (from .406 to .490), raising their average launch angle by more than three full degrees (13.7-16.9), posting a home run/fly ball percentage more