MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

If only the Yankees get access to this, the rest of the league will simply vote to outlaw it.

You see something similar going on in football, right now, with a play known as the "tush push". It's not a particularly complex play, but for some reason the Philadelphia Eagles can pull it off astoundingly better than anyone else in the league. In response, several teams are petitioning rules to outlaw it. All it takes is enough teams to vote for banning this play and it's gone.

The have the rule where the team defending the field goal is not allowed to act like a “locomotive” to push thru and try to block the kick, which would almost certainly work because the edge blockers cannot just defend come inside to defend it.

The tush push shouldn’t be allowed because is almost impossible to defend, sort of an automatic 1 yarder once you get there. The snapping team always have advantage because they know the start timing and the defense always has to react a split second later.

In both cases why not?

1. Make the kicker kick from farther out in that case. Pretty simple change.

2. 1 yard is kind of nothing in this league now when the referees have so much leeway to change yardage. They get the spot wrong ALL the damn time now. So what if it's automatic for some teams. And so what if the offense has the advantage there. That's sport. Same thing in soccer on penalty kicks, the kicker has the advantage there knowing where he's going to kick.

Is almost impossible to defend when done by a particular team. No other team has managed the kind of sustained success with it that the Eagles have. If it was impossible to defend surely other teams would be using it too.

Tom Brady also had similar success with the standard old QB sneak during his career and I don't recall attempts to ban that.

> the "tush push". It's not a particularly complex play, but for some reason the Philadelphia Eagles can pull it off astoundingly better than anyone else in the league

I looked this up and am still unclear why only the Eagles seem to be able to perform this maneuver effectively, other than having an exceptionally strong person at the front?

Three massive offensive linemen plus a very strong QB.

It's strength, size and technique of multiple people working together.

You'd think it'd be easy to watch game footage and just replicate what the Eagles do, but other teams haven't been able to get the formula right.

This is the reason that banning it is controversial. Why make it illegal when most teams can't make work well?

One additional wrinkle to the tush push is that it WAS illegal until the mid-2000s. Sort of like the 3 point line in basketball, it has taken many years for a team to take advantage of the new rule to its fullest extent.

I think people generally take the perspective of "it used to be illegal, so it's reasonable to make it illegal again" in a way they don't when a team is just doing something new.

> You see something similar going on in football, right now, with a play known as the "tush push".

As a European that just woke up from a nap, I was having a very hard time imagning a soccer move called "tush push" that was so successful it had to be outlawed...

Their quarterback squatting 600 lbs doesn’t hurts.

They've recruited the players necessary to pull it off effectively. That's not a simple thing to remedy for other teams.

the rule for FG/XP attempts is for the safety of the long snapper, not the kicker

We'll see if the analogy holds. Every team has the ability to use bats like this.

If no other team sees an advantage from using torpedo bats, it would be a lot like the brotherly shove.

But first we'll have to see if this is a passing fad. In baseball, pitchers evolve pretty quickly and usually lead the batter-pitcher arms race.

I'm guessing it spread pretty quickly through the league and be used by a minority of hitters, and the advantage will flatten out. So a .210 hitter may hit .230. That is a big difference no doubt, but compare the game to when leading batters were hitting .330.

Contrary to popular belief, it requires a fair bit of practice to get right, which is why you see hater GMs saying oh, yeah, it's so simple we could do it if we wanted, but then they try it in a game after one practice and it fails. The Eagles spent several years practicing it, so now they're that far behind.

Right, but if the kicker needs to move further back in response, the tactic doesn't work anymore so the snapper is safe as well.

Also helps he is not exceptionally tall to keep a lower center of gravity.

Josh Allen on the bills also tries this and is very strong but it's harder for him to get as low.

It's like when people started to freak out about the "pitch clock" and how it was ruining baseball. The thing is, the pitch clock _always_ existed in the rulebook, it was just never enforced due to lack of technology and just generally never really being a problem.

And then pitchers started taking 1 minute+ to throw a dang pitch and it was ruining the flow of the game. So they started enforcing it.

They need to get some rugby coaches in to teach it. That's a super-basic rugby technique, which even I (as only a very casual rugby fan) can see most teams getting wrong.

The Eagles did- one of their players has a rugby background.

What basic rugby technique?

A rugby scrum is highly regimented, it's not the optimal way for 3 (or 5 or 8) guys to push the other team back, it's the optimal way to do it given that they must be bound in a particular way.

A rugby ruck or maul is more freeform and maybe some of the techniques from those can be applied to NFL, but small differences in rules make a big difference there too.

On a different question, though, sure, the Eagles have a massive and strong QB who is perfect for this play, but other teams have huge guys playing other positions. Why not have a different quarterback for your QB sneak / tush push plays? Specialist players for niche situations is a trademark of the NFL compared to other professional sports, and this play doesn't rely on the element of surprise. You don't need to have your best player at passing the ball also be the strongest at breaking the line.

My small daughter is watching https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Captain_Tsubasa , and I think I saw something like that in one episode.

Philly is known as the city of brotherly love so there was a movement on r/nfl to have it be named the brotherly shove. Never quite caught on though.

Often lost in the debate is the fact that the Philly QB is uncommonly athletic for his position and that Philly typically has a top-5 O-line on any given year.

nicely done.

I was thinking of a maul, yeah. What I've spotted is NFL guys pushing with their hands on a teammate's back, instead of (like in rugby, or what the Eagles do) getting their shoulders against his ass or upper thighs, which gives more power and better leverage.

Good point about using different players, and I even think I've seen that a time or two. As for why not always do it, I'm only guessing, but there may be an inherent advantage in preserving the possibility that it won't be a "tush push" play (I mean, maybe not for the Eagles, because they're so good at it, but for other teams who aren't). Like, maybe it keeps the linebackers a step or two deeper and increases the likelihood of success; or, if they provoke a "tush push" defense that opens up a more-promising play then the QB is best placed to run the counter. I don't really know, though.

Yeah, I think that's their secret sauce. It's curious that other teams haven't followed suit.