Acoustic analysis of MLB's torpedo bat: how shape changes the sweet spot

When the New York Yankees opened the 2025 season wielding a new generation of tapered bats, dubbed torpedo bats because the widest barrel point sits closer to where most hitters actually make contact, the baseball world wanted to know one thing: is the new shape actually better? Dan Russell, an acoustician at Pennsylvania State University, has built a career using sound and vibration to answer exactly that kind of question. At the 190th Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America in Philadelphia, he delivered his answer.

Russell's tool of choice is modal analysis. The bat is struck with a calibrated instrumented hammer, and accelerometers capture the resulting vibrations along the barrel and handle. By striking at points all along the bat and watching how movement in one place affects every other, Russell reconstructs a set of vibrational mode shapes, each with its own natural frequency. Those mode shapes are what let an analyst pinpoint two features that matter most to a player: the sweet spot in the barrel, which governs batted ball speed, and the equivalent zone in the handle, which governs the felt sensation at contact.

That second measurement is what most performance studies miss. Russell pointed out that amateur and professional batters alike judge bats primarily by sound and feel, often before any analytic data on exit velocity enters the picture. Two most important things a player cares about, in his words, are the way the bat sounds when it hits the ball and what it feels like during the impact, and those acoustic and tactile properties weight a player's perception of quality more heavily than the eventual ball trajectory.

Russell's analysis shows that the torpedo shape does shift the bat's sweet spot, moving it toward the rebalanced barrel, but the magnitude depends on the specific taper and the player's contact location. A hitter who consistently makes contact at the redistributed sweet spot may gain a measurable acoustic and energy advantage. A hitter who doesn't may experience no improvement at all, or even feel worse vibration in the handle.

For equipment designers across baseball, softball, golf and racquet sports, the takeaway is the same. Acoustic and modal analysis remains one of the most direct ways to evaluate how a redesign actually performs in a player's hands.

[Read the full piece](https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1127040)