Phys.org: acoustic analysis shows torpedo bats shift the sweet spot

Bat design has been in a quiet but pointed arms race for years, and the latest entrant, the torpedo-shaped bat the New York Yankees adopted last spring, is now under formal acoustic scrutiny. A Phys.org write-up of work by Pennsylvania State University's Dan Russell summarises the case for why torpedo bats may have a real, measurable effect on baseball's sweet spot, and why acoustic measurement is the right tool to evaluate them.

Russell has spent decades using acoustic techniques to evaluate sporting equipment. The list of items he has measured at Penn State reads like a museum of athletic gear: golf clubs, tennis rackets, hockey sticks, table tennis paddles, baseball bats of every era. The technique at the centre of all of it is modal analysis. The bat is struck with an instrumented hammer at points along its length, and the resulting vibrations are captured and decomposed into mode shapes. Each mode shape has its own natural frequency, and the locations where those modes line up tell an engineer where the sweet spot for batted-ball speed sits, as well as where the bat will feel most comfortable in the hitter's hands.

What makes the torpedo bat interesting is the redistribution of mass. Because the barrel tapers toward the end, the widest portion moves slightly inboard relative to a traditional bat. That, in theory, lines the meatiest part of the barrel up with the spot where most major-league hitters actually contact the ball. Russell's measurements support that the sweet spot does shift, though the size of the shift depends on the precise taper geometry and on the player's own contact pattern.

There's a broader point in the work that often gets missed in equipment coverage. Most players, professional and amateur, evaluate a bat by sound and feel before they look at any exit-velocity data. Two most important things a player cares about, Russell has said, are the way the bat sounds and what it feels like at impact. That makes acoustic and modal techniques uniquely suited to predicting whether a new design will actually catch on across leagues.

[Read the full piece](https://phys.org/news/2026-05-torpedo-shift-baseball-sweet-acoustic.html)