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

This seems to most help with guys who were hitting the ball most often not at the sweet spot. By moving the sweet spot to where they are hitting the ball, they might gain some power.

A bat needs to be round, a solid piece of wood, less than a certain length and less than a certain diameter. The actual shape is not defined.

It's interesting to me, who is not a baseball player but a software engineer, that even at the level of professional sports the solution is not to just train the athletes to swing the ideal bat "correctly" but to redesign the bat to be sub-optimal but such that when the players use it "wrong" the right thing happens.

The physicists and swing coaches and trainers and teammates have probably been telling Volpe and Chisholm for almost 2 decades to make contact at the tip of the bat instead of closer to their hands. But the solution turned out to be adjusting the bat and not the swing. Fascinating.

I can sit in my office and deliberate on the location of buttons and indicators on the screen and come up with the objectively best arrangement per ISA 101 high-performance HMI standards, but if operators keep making messes because their intuition about that system is wrong, maybe I should just change the way the machine operates to match.

The biomechanics involved are insane. You are hitting a baseball-sized object (ha) moving at 90+ mph with massive break, often very late and over two axes, with something a couple of inches in diameter, and need to make decisions and react and adjust your swing path in a handful of milliseconds. And that’s just to make contact, let alone good contact, let alone contact that can find a patch of grass.

It’s the single hardest skill in competitive team sports in my opinion.

> Know what the difference between hitting .250 and .300 is? It's 25 hits. 25 hits in 500 at bats is 50 points, okay? There's 6 months in a season, that's about 25 weeks. That means if you get just one extra flare a week - just one - a gorp... you get a groundball, you get a groundball with eyes... you get a dying quail, just one more dying quail a week... and you're in Yankee Stadium.

(Crash Davis)