Rates & Barrels - Keenan Long of LongBall Labs talks Torpedo Bats & Much More

Episode Date: April 1, 2025

Eno is joined by Keenan Long of LongBall Bats to talk everything bats. He talks about the process of finding the right bat for a player, the different types of bats & handles, the sudden rise of the torpedo bat, what's in the future for bats and much more. Rundown 1:01- Process of finding the right bat for players 5:41- Common bat terminology 16:09- Different types of bats 19:24- Torpedo Bat breaks out & what's the give and take of the bat 25:40- Increased data has cause bat changes 31:08- Different types of handles on bats 33:06- What's in the future for bat technology 39:07- Torpedo bats have been around Follow Eno on Bluesky: @enosarris.bsky.social Follow DVR on Bluesky: @dvr.bsky.social e-mail: [e-mail] Join our Discord: https://discord.gg/FyBa9f3wFe Subscribe to The Athletic: theathletic.com/ratesandbarrels Hosts: Eno Sarris Producer: Brian Smith Executive Producer: Derek VanRiper Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Music Music Music Alright, welcome to Rates and Barrels everybody. This is a special episode. DVR has the day off and I get to talk to one of my favorite people in the bat world.

Keenan Long of Long Ball Labs. We sat down a long time ago at a winter meetings where you were trying to get Long Ball Labs off of the ground. You were trying to start it, for it to even be a thing. But the same idea that you had all those years ago at the winter meetings when we had a beverage was what you have done.

You've accomplished it. So tell us about Long Ball Labs and what you do for Long Ball Labs. What Long Ball Labs does. Absolutely, this is a full circle moment. Yes. Because when we had that beverage, you told me go get the bats and get the data.

Don't wait for a team to hire you. And Long Ball Labs has now been hired by a team. Can't say which team, but that's one of our big updates. Yeah. So Long Ball Labs does a bat optimization process, which is beyond bat fitting. It's beyond the length weight turning model that's written on the bat order form. Our goal is to find the optimal bat parameters, of which there are many, which I'm sure we'll get into, for the individual hitter.

And then we focus on consulting with the factory to help them hit those targets. We're a third party, so we don't care what bat brand you swing. All we care is that you're getting the best that you can for you. Doing so basically increases that involved distance by basically the width of the warning track. We can boast, there are dozens and dozens of warning track flyouts per season that are converted into home runs.

And this is not necessarily, I mean, you've added a component where you now will make some recommendations about length and weight and model. But one of the beginning parts of this was that not every weight, I mean, I wrote a piece with you about this called No Two Trees Are Like.

So we're dealing with a wooden bat that is made in ways that maybe the quality assurance is difficult to really nail down the way you have. So you are almost doing third party quality assurance where you're like, this is actually the bat you ordered. Because I mean, sometimes these bats come with fairly wide differences from what they ordered. Way wider than you would expect in any bat metric that you could possibly

think of. And this hits on like the idea of bat fitting. What happens in the batting cage that one day when you find that golden bat, it turns out that the production of the bats for that player afterwards do not match with that golden bat that was found via the data driven process of bat fitting. So that's why we had to come up with the idea of bat optimization, which is not just what was the golden bat for you? What was the best parameters, balance points, et cetera, et cetera?

What is actually being produced for you? And then how do we turn that information into reducing the standard deviation of the bats that are made for you and then moving the mean if we need to for various reasons to match your goals. Mostly it's maximizing exit velocity and contact quality. But yes, the variability exists among all brands. It's not a special thing.

And I also like to tell the players, there's no like Dr. Evil at the top of the bat making pyramid who's doing this on purpose. They're receiving wood, which is a variable material. And it took, honestly, it took talking to you for hours about this, for me to realize that your headline was the most perfect, concise way of saying. No two bats are the same because no two trees are the same.

So this has been a process that players have undergone by feel for so long. And I've seen, I talked to Ozzy Albies a little bit, I've seen players ping the bat, like sort of with their finger or with something hard and try and listen. I thought, I was like, that's just ridiculous. But there is some science to that.

And that there could be, I bet you batters had been okay at this without science to some degree, finding the best bat in their bag. They always had the gamer, right? But there's still like, not everyone has that skill. And sometimes that's a skill that maybe takes five years to like, why not give a rookie the ability to figure out what the best bat is, you know?

Absolutely. This reminds me of my first day as a bat engineer in 2012. I had to go through three lock doors to get to my job. It was all top secret stuff. That's right, we didn't talk about your background, but you started with Easton, right? Yes, yeah. Back in 2012, I stepped off the field as a player

and straight into this private, sneaky lab where I got to spend all this money analyzing all this stuff. And one of the first lessons they taught me was never count out what a player tells you in a test. So we had a batting cage with all the ability to read Exit Blassey and all that stuff. And the whole feel is real argument played out every day of my career for those six years. And if the player is telling you something, something is up, I feel something or something

is different, you need to investigate what that is because their hands are finally tuned. It was fun to test that out in various ways. And I'm sure we will get into that. I've tested that out now with Longbow Labs, with working with Big League Hitters as well. And when the feel matches the reel and then the players are given data on top of that, it's really exciting to see them light up and know that they're going up to the plate

with the absolute best bat. If we wanna talk about this, you know, the bat science and what's going on, we have to have common terminology. So, you know, one thing that I asked, that I was asked is like, is there a common terminology for the space between the barrel and the handle is like, let's let's taper. That's the taper.

When the straight section ends the yeah, the tape, the tape guys usually put their pine stem. Yeah, I've heard stem. Okay, yeah, taper. And then the barrel is often referred to as a straight section. Yeah, the wood bats, there's not a lot of straight section and a lot of times the bat funnels down at the end to meet weight specs anyway, or because the turning model dictates that. We had the cupping anyway, like the sort of the stuff that's taken out of the end, you know, so there's always been a little bit of a bend on those.

It's not a metal bat where it's kind of like super straight across the barrel. And the cupping is a great one to dive into a little bit here. Cupping is done, some companies will cup the bats at variable depths in order to meet a total weight spec. So they've got the bat on a kitchen scale that just reads the total weight. And if the bat comes out a little heavy, they're going to cup it a little more. But that changes. If the bat comes out a little heavy, they're gonna cup it a little more. But that changes- If the bat comes out a little bit light,

they're gonna cup it less. That changes a lot of other stuff that the player doesn't have, necessarily have insight into. And may not have requested. They just requested a certain weight. Exactly. So Longbow Labs will pick up a bunch of bats

from a player over the course of a season and see cup depths that vary from the shallowest, meaning zero, no cup, all the way down to the deepest allowable. Wow. And while that helps hit the weight spec, the overall weight spec, you're seeing very different balance points. You're seeing very different amount of mass in total mass in the barrel. It also changes balance point is if you were if you were trying to put this on like on just like a, if you're trying to put the bat on on a knife edge, how it would balance? Like where would balance?

So where like half of the weight is on one side and half the weight is on the other side. Exactly. And so like a typical balance point of a typical bat is gonna be, call it 20 inches. So you take the knob, you measure 20 inches from the knob, and then you've got somewhere around here, that's 20 inches from the knob. That would be considered the balance point of the bat. You're talking about 20 inches of weight in the taper and in the

handle. Usually these bats are 30-31 inches, So the other half of the weight is in the last third of the bat. So if you've got a super end heavy bat, that balance point is gonna be a larger number because you need more of the handle to counteract the weight. What's the relationship of the balance point to the moment of inertia? So tell me a little bit about moment of inertia, MOI.

This is about how the bats turns in space. Yes and the balance point that number is a direct input into the calculation of the MLI. But what is MLI? So it's the mass moment of inertia. So the bats resistance to movement in space. A bat with a high, I think of it like sledgehammers. A sledgehammer has a high mass moment of inertia and a broomstick has a low mass moment of inertia because you can. Sledgehammer has all the weight on the end.

So yeah, so balance point is very important into this conversation. Absolutely, yes. And like, if you think about taking that sledgehammer and instead of swinging it the way a construction worker would, you flip it around and swing it with the weight under your hand or even close to your hand, that is going to be easier for you to get around and that the weight of that sledgehammer has not changed, but the location of the weight has changed and that affects the balance.

So if this was a bat you know you'd be plus bat speed however you'd be losing in some other stats so tell me a little bit about because it's you know forces mass times like there's a mass here so there's a there's a density there's a tell me about what stats are important because the same stats that are important for exit velocity, bat stats are important for exit velocity, are not necessarily the same that are important for bat speed. Like in your example, if you took the reverse sledgehammer,

you could whip that around really fast. However, it might not be the most effective bat because it would be skinny as heck and not impart much mass or density on the ball when it coll it when it collided. So is that are we talking about collision efficiency or time density? What are the stats that matter? You know, when it comes to the interaction with the ball and imparting exit velocity on it from bat speed? out in the one millisecond that the bat and ball are touching. So we're talking about the pitch comes in, the player makes perfect contact, they hit the ball where they're trying to, and they're crushing the ball.

That one millisecond where the bat and ball are touching, the only exchange in the physics world we have that's happening right there is an exchange of momentum. So it is governed in physics terms, to get nerdy for a second, it is governed by the conservation of linear moment. That is what is playing out. But it's also a collision.

So there's momentums going in different directions. Yes, you have to conserve the momentum from the ball coming in and from the back. Which is why if you watch a bat in slow motion, it wiggles or like it accepts force. Like it doesn't just go forward. It accepts force. If you hit the ball perfectly on the hate to use this term sweet spot, cause it's so differently defined. But if you hit the ball on the center of percussion, let's use that term.

Cause it is one location along the barrel. The bat does not have a vibrational response. And this is the fascinating thing. You mentioned players have been able to empirically understand what bats are good for them and what are not, they can get to an 80 85% optimization level on their own because they're finely tuned athletic machines. And that's what we love. The center of percussion is when the player tells you, and I felt this as a

player, a dream of it, you hit the ball tells you, and I felt this as a player, I dream of it, you hit the ball and you don't feel anything in your hands. That's because the bat had no vibrational response because the ball happened to strike the center of percussion. Okay, so now we're getting some more terms here. So we've got center of percussion and sweet spot, which may not be the same.

So the center of percussion is what? Let's look at it. This is what they're pinging for when they're when they're hitting it. Yes, yes. And I almost went into a center of percussion. Because I think that's what they're going for. I've seen players paying the bats in various ways where they're moving the location of the finger trying to find that point where the bat doesn't vibrate. So this is a barrel we have here and I drew it up to show players because all the players are told by the reps that are selling bats to them, oh our sweet spot used to be this big and now it's this big. Or the other brand, theirs is this big and ours is this big. And the truth is, it's they're solid

pieces of material hitting a ball. There's only one point that's going to produce the highest rebound, the highest exit velocity. And on this bat, it's this green, very thin green. I didn't make it super thin. Can you see that? Yeah. Why is that the center of percussion? That's the center of percussion because of how the mass is distributed along the bat. Is it the wood grain?

The wood grain has an indirect play in here. I know the wood grain is a story that has been told to differentiate bats and I think it would be fair to say that it has a lot to do with the durability of the bat, but there's been a conflation of durability. Okay, so you have this tiny center of percussion. Oh yes. And then maybe around the center of percussion is maybe a sweet spot where maybe you hit the ball, you know, 90% on the center of percussion and 10% not or whatever, like you hit around it,

you know, and you still get, you still get that sort of, you still get more momentum conservancy like you get you like you would want 100 percent momentum conservation into the ball right is that what the sweet spot does is that what the center of percussion does when the bat vibrates after the collision that vibration is robbing energy from the collision so that's why when you hit it poorly like let's say out here that stings your hands a lot. That vibration of the bat, it's vibrating like a wave. And that's energy that did not go into the ball.

Exactly, it didn't go into the ball and that's why the ball doesn't have the same exit velocity. So looking at this thin green line, at this impact location, you're getting the highest exit velocity. As your impact location moves this way, it goes down because more and more energy

is being robbed from the collision, going into the vibration response of the bat and the ball by the way one millisecond it's already gone right so the vibration that doesn't affect the balls collision other than it took the bat had to take that energy what is the white area on that I didn't have a lot of different color tape at the time that I made this so it was just these these are the zones where like the farther away you get the more energy is being robbed from the collision and so and have a lot of different colored tape at the time that I made this. So it was just, these are the zones where like the farther away you get,

the more energy is being robbed from the collision. And so what we do at Long Ball Labs is we ask players, I've asked all around the league and no one is giving the player a target. They know it empirically after they hit the ball. Well, they also know it as baseball players, I guess intuitively, right? But like training bats, training bats could have it on there like that. they hit the ball. Well they also know it as baseball players I guess intuitively right? But

but like training bats, training bats could have it on there like that. They should, they definitely should and we do mark some of the bats for training purposes for our players who want this information but if you do just the eye test like we said the cupping can affect it, the billet choice that was used to make this individual bat can affect where this location is and the turning model can affect it. And so if you do just the eye test to say, ah, it's about here, you could be actually right here or right here. Especially if you have the largest cupping or the zero cupping. The variables that go into that moment of percussion are similar to the moment of inertia and the balance. Like

it's a relationship of mass. It's a symphony. It's an absolute symphony because all of the equations are using those variables and they go together to make up the conservation of linear momentum, which governs what happens in the core. Right. So, all right. So we're getting somewhere. So the different ways that you could affect the bat are you could have a sort of a hockey puck, you know, at the bottom, which would I would assume would move the moment of inertia closer to your hands. Yes, it actually moves your hands closer to the balance. Okay. All right. It doesn't move the balance point down because you're adding length to the back in the process. Oh, yes. So your hands closer to the balance. Okay. All right. It doesn't move the balance point down because you're adding length to the back and the process.

Oh yeah. So your hands are closer up to it. I guess the waters have been muddied a little bit on that with, with some of the branding and yeah, it just, it moves your hands closer to the balance point. Moving the balance point as little as 0.2 inches is feelable by the players by big league hitters. And the field, what they'll get from it is increased bat speed.

Yeah, it all depends on their swing. I think that's the biggest variable in this whole thing is who is swinging the bat. So I always remind myself and the people we work with, all these variables are very important. It's great to figure out what is being produced and to zero in on that, but we have to make sure it's aimed at the guy swinging the bat because that person is the biggest target.

If I could give you a perfect description of someone's bat path, because now bat path grades are increasingly, and we have increasingly more data about angles in the, angles in the back and like sort of descriptions of the whole swing, you know, as that proliferates and as we get better at understanding that, could you talk about that fitting almost in a theoretical space before you even get to sitting down with them? We were like, I've looked at your swing and like you've got X angle here and X approach angle here. You've got you got a you got a scoopier swing or flatter swing and you know it more puns of you know regular parents but like you know you be speaking in angles and you said be given these angles that you're in your current swing. You know I would i would suggest a bat that had a memo for further here or closer in or whatever it is based on basically your low like basically that first move maybe is that are that is are that's when you talk

about how a swing could be different how different swings could you need different bats like what where would you think the various would be? Yeah I think the way they approach the ball is important it could tell us how sensitive that player could be to changes in the barrel mass. That's where my head goes immediately in that conversation of trying to have something prepared before getting to work with the player before getting to do the performance test in the batting cage. So all of the recommendations we make are based on the outcome using a performance test with the

player. But that is what you're saying is the next step. And I think a huge part of that is the mountain, you got to have a mountain of that data. We just, by the way, just surpassed, I didn't get to have an MLB career and get 3000 hits, but we just surpassed 3000 bats. 3000 major league bats made for major league players just surpassed that. And I didn't really get a chance to do anything but a little fist pump because my inbox was full with- More stuff to do. ... information requests for what's been happening this past week.

Many think of beauty and health as disconnected, but beauty and wellness are really two sides of the same coin. Hello, I'm Isabella Rossellini. And in the final episode of This Is Not a Beauty podcast, we'll hear from a cancer survivor, an anthropologist, and a carer of the elderly about the relationship between beauty and health. Listen now on your favorite podcast platform. I think we finally come all the way around to the torpedo bats, because we've talked about now the hockey puck.

Hockey puck is, you know, moving your hands closer to the moment of inertia might increase your bat speed. In some ways, the torpedo is doing the opposite, where it's the way they've it's explained to me it's it's moving more mass kind of closer to the handle and away from the end. I've seen a good mock-up of the torpedo bats maybe moving the sweet spot closer to the handle on the order of a half inch or so by removing some of the mass. It's almost like advanced

cupping in a way. It's just taking more mass out of the end of the bat in order to kind of change where the sweet spot is. If I put a hockey puck on the bottom of my bat, is there a takeaway? The hockey puck, for anybody who knows, like look at the, pick up the handle. It's just like your bat that you've got. It's just almost like if you just took a bunch of tape

and like taped it on the bottom and like just made it bigger. Or there's like an attachment that they, or it's just like, it's designed differently. Yeah, and it just extends and adds weight underneath where your hands grip the bat. What's the give and the take? If the give is a slightly more band speed, what is the take?

The result is the balance point moves this way by a little bit towards the barrel, but your hands move up by about an inch and a quarter. Would that mean that the sweet spot, almost like the torpedo bat, the sweet spot would also move a little bit further along? It could, yes. So the balance point ends up being closer to your hands because your hands moved up. And we know from performance testing with our hitters that as the balance point gets closer to the player's hands, just like choking up on bat, you are able to get

a higher swing speed if you're not already maxed out in the swing speed in the grip setting that you currently have. So that's a big tip. To your question about the give and take, all of this stuff goes into the main category of give and take of your swing speed that you're able to produce with that set of bat parameters versus the amount of mass in the barrel that's going into the ball. So if you were trying to keep a 31-ounce bat, a 30-ounce bat or whatever, what's the regular? Is it 30? Yeah, 30, 31. So if you're trying to keep a 31- ounce bat and you put that hockey puck on, then maybe you cupped to keep it 31 ounce. Either you're putting more mass on the bat

and now it's 31 and a half or something because you put the hockey puck on the bottom, which changes things. This was a huge misconception because players were asking companies, can you make my bat and put a puck knob on it? And the company said, yes. But what they did was they shaved a ton off the barrel outer diameter

and they cupped it a bunch. So now you're taking away a lot of barrel mass. So now the give and take is exit velocity. So in some ways you giving bat speed, which does turn into exit velocity, but you're, you're taking away the amount of mass that's colliding with the ball. And momentum is mass times velocity. So you're optimizing between those two, how much, ideally you want the player to be swinging as much mass as they can still get to their maximum swing speed. Now for these players who are having, if a player is meant or is going to benefit from a puck knob

or from a torpedo type bat, a couple things need to be true for that to be beneficial for them. One, they need to be currently swinging a bat that has too much mass in the barrel for them. That extra mass is causing a deficit in their swing speed. Now, as you can imagine, basically it's a little too heavy for them. imagine, basically, it's a little too heavy for that. Yeah, basically, it's just a little too heavy, a little too unloaded for that player. And there are certainly plenty of big league hitters for whom that is the case.

You can imagine a player who's been in the big leagues for 10 years. That person is not the same hitter. They have declining bat speed. But they are swinging the same hitter they were. They have declining bat speed. Yeah, but they are swinging the same. That's interesting. Can have an old man bat. Yeah, exactly. So some hitters I think we're

dancing around this torpedo thing. Is it the end all be all? And the answer is it's not. There are trade offs to be had, and I can tell you from having done on-site performance testing with big league hitters, there are some hitters who would absolutely not benefit from taking mass out of the barrel of their bats, just as there are also players who have already benefited from the other six ways that you can reduce barrel mass. That reduced barrel mass has led to a major uptick

in swing speed, which has offset the loss in mass going into the collision, which is a conservation of the movement. Right, right. So I mean, you could do, instead of the torpedo, you could just have like, give me the max cupping, like, you know, like just go all the way down that they allow.

And so what is the trade off? I feel like it's maybe as simple as maybe someone who goes oppo a lot, like the torpedo bat, if you're going oppo, if you hit it at all, like from the sweet spot to the outer, to the end of the bat, then you've reduced the mass that might be there. So you might reduce some of your oppo exit velocities because there's just not as much mass out there.

Yeah, that makes sense. Yep. And for guys who are getting jammed, it makes sense to do what you can to move the point of maximum performance of the barrel inward closer to the hands. It's much easier to make an adjustment to the bat than to have the hitter make this massive changing your impact location as a hitter is rather difficult. Because you've trained that your whole life, like you've tried to hit the bat with the ball, you've been doing that since, you know, literally.

I think from what we've seen so far in the data from testing with players, that part of a hitter is more or less locked in. We have a special name for the metric, it's the distance from the very, your index finger of your top hand on the bat to your point of maximum, or point of most common impact.

And bats need to be tuned to that. The player should not have to tune themselves because there's so many ways you can adjust to get the bat to match with. So to some extent, this moment that we're having with a torpedo bat and just with bats in general is due to the increased data that we're getting, because now we can actually, thanks to Hawkeye, pretty much get that stat that you're talking about the most common point of impact on the bat for the, for

the batter, and we can on the bat for the batter. And we can get that really dialed in. And so that's why if you look at the Yankees, not everyone's, you know, hitting the torpedo bat, even if they, you know, helped these players to this realization that maybe they would be a good fit for the torpedo bat. I mean, there was one pitch in particular that we highlighted, which was a kind of an up and in cutter to Anthony Volpe that he only hit out at like 93, 94 miles an hour,

that, you know, with a different bat, just like if you looked at it, you'd be like, oh, that's a decent pitch. Like it was in the strike zone, but it was up and in, you know, that's a decent pitch. But with the change in where the moment of percussion was or the change in that head, he might've, that bat might've actually helped him

hit that homer. But if he was out, and I think that makes also sense for with guys like Volpe, he doesn't have the premium exit velocity. So I don't think like, Juan Soto should probably not do the torpedo bat, I think, I mean, A, he's going oppo and B, he has these tremendous exit velocities

to all parts of the field. He wants to maybe have some variability to his, his most often point of impact. He wants to be able to pull it and push it, you know, to cover the plate. We've seen that trend for sure. Young, big sluggers who have a ton of rotational ability and are in their prime,

that's the guy you don't want to take barrel mass away from. Unless he's currently swinging a super sledgehammery bat that's preventing him from making contact, which we know the guys probably are not doing. I would say more often than not, when we work with players who have that profile, they are closing in on getting performance advantage by slightly increasing the barrel mass, which is the opposite of what a torpedo bat does. Granted, we've also had players on the other side, like I said, on the other side of like the aging curve,

where the data from the performance test with that player shows that the bat with a little bit less barrel mass. And I'm talking about bats that were produced to the same spec on the same day. We're living within the variability of the production capacity. Within the bats they were given, let's take these ones that are actually

just a little bit lighter in the barrel because... And that's how we zero in on their parameters and then we go back to the factory and tell them, here's what worked best for this player. And then that guy kind of reminded me of it like one of the stories with one of the players. His was the lightest barrel of any bath that had been produced for him up to that point. Was the far and away winner in the performance test in the batting cage with him. And he knew it, he was finally tuned athletic machine and he ended up getting a pitch high in a lot.

You didn't wanna like, you know, come back to their back with like a bat rack with like a 29 ounce bat. You know, like to. Thankfully he didn't change his turning ball, he didn't have to. He didn't have to. He changed other parameters on the production floor. And he was taking the high, tight,

foreseen fastballs that he had been getting a steady diet of and he was hitting them out of the park and texting, yeah dude, that's my... Cause he's able to turn it faster. Interesting. So if the torpedo bat is one thing that helps a certain type of player, are there other shapes that we haven't dreamt up yet?

You're talking about these in their prime guys. Are any of them, should they move it along? Should we have a nice, really long, thin taper? And just push as much mass into the outside of that bat as possible? Are there hitters that would benefit from that. There's definitely been some fun theoretical research done on this that has created some pretty interesting looking bat shapes.

And I think it all comes back to testing with the player. And like I'm telling our clients about they're asking me about this torpedo phenomenon and I'm making sure they understand that it's going to be a very big change from whatever bat design they have at the time, if it is going to be a large change, and then remind them of players that we have worked with who jumped on board, say, the puck knob phenomenon

when it happened, and remind them that only about give or take 20% of the players who picked that up are still swinging it right now in the big league. So that means there's a 80% of those guys that struggled mightily with the change and then either went back to their prior bat metrics or didn't get to keep playing. So that's something that we're and this is why my main fear with phenomenon like these happening is what is best for someone else may not be what is best for you. And it's important to know how big of a change am I making? And then to really dial in performance testing. Because like

I said, the biggest variable here is not any bat metric, it's the player swinging the bat. And that's why long ball labs and no other truly scientific entity is ever gonna come out and say that there is one universal truth about what is best in a bat. For my edification, like we have had some innovation around the handle too. So what did something like the axe handle do? What does that do in our conversation?

What metrics does that change? Asymmetric bat handles have been an interesting case study because there's more than one type and some players really gravitate towards one over the other. There's not a ton of third party objective data that I've seen about them. I think it is very personal to the player. We've had players go in and out of those asymmetric handles. And I think it all shakes out into what happens when we put it in your hands and test you with it.

These bats need to be bats of known parameters. You don't just pick two bats. Because you don't even know how good, like how well it came out to the specifications they wanted. So you first, so the best process is something like, you know, order a certain bat, you know, test it to make sure it is what the, what, you know, you get the best bat that is actually what it's supposed to be. Then take them into an environment with, uh, you know, maybe edutronic, but also very much

Hawkeye, like LIDAR,ar, like as many different tracking parameters as possible so that you can say different things about maybe the shape of their swing, as well as how the ball comes off the bat. Make them, you know, make it as scientific and clinical as possible. I'm sure this is very much what your process is like. And the hard part is at the beginning

when I have to tell the player, they're like, are the bats good or bad? I have to tell them. Don't know yet. I can't answer that question at all. I can tell you, here's exactly how they are different from each other. Let's find out which one of these is perfect for you.

And then we'll go back, figure out how to replicate and clone all those bat parameters going well beyond just length, weight and turning model. Talking about some of the variables that we talked about. Yeah. All right. And one last bit. We're 10 years in the future. I'm a batter. I've got, I brought three, four bats to the field today. In the first inning, I decide I want this bat. Like I've got them labeled. In the second inning, you know, this guy's been throwing sliders to me all day. It's just been sliders.

Is there another bat I could take? In the third inning, it's the gassed up, you know, or maybe the fourth, you know, the ninth inning, it's the gassed up closer. And this guy's throwing, you know, 102. Is it possible that batters at some point will go to the field with four ideal bats, maybe three ideal bats, they have a backup up for each,

that has been sort of tuned to situational needs? I mean, could you, I mean, I've talked a little bit on this. It's not in the future, it's in the past. Yeah, like I talked about this with Jed Lowry a little bit. Yeah. He was like a manager making his lineup for the game. He was making his own lineup of his, of his bats and which one he was going to use against which pitcher. He was very much ahead of his time, but I did speak with a player today who was explaining to me how he does, how he prepares for each day. And he knows how the bats have slightly different parameters.

The ones that are like really close to his optimal. He knows how they affect his swing speed and his contact quality. He's so fine tuned that I mean, it's a long season players. Feel good or bad, depending on various things that happen to them. And so he ran me through a process, kind of like what you were saying before the game, off the tee, then off the machine. And he has a few little tweaks that he can make. And he brings each of those bats with him to the dugout. So before the game or before he arrives at the stadium

that day, he's not sure which bats he dials it in while he's getting warmed up. And to say it in dumbest way possible, it's like there's the bat speed bat, and then there's the like do damage bat. Like is there like the sort of. There's my wrist hurts bat. Yeah. It's the dog days, it's August, so tired. What bat would be the contact bat?

You know, because contact has been increasingly important. What, when I, like a lot of what we talked about is increasing damage, I think. We've talked a lot about sort of having more mass on the barrel, putting the mass in the right place. That's damage, we're talking about damage. What is the, is bat speed the way for contact? Is that, would that be more the puck or whatever,

like more bats with maybe more weight in the handle and the taper? Would those bats be more bat speed bats that theoretically could get them to contact? I mean, bat speed, when I hear bat speed, I also hear damage. So the only thing I'm asking is like, what's the metric that I'm linking to contact?

There's a quick and dirty way to optimize for contact. Could I make a really fat skinny barrel that was like just bigger? Like there's actual rule about, the rule book says at two point six Inches or whatever right like you can't make yes the rules are so wide open but they really spec that could I make something that goes the two point six inches and Is the biggest barrel, but it's somehow light Yeah, they're thinking the billet choice or the wood species choice and have an effect on that. There are a numerous amount.

So I could make a very light wood big bat that was actually somehow light cup it to the extreme and have like basically the biggest lightest bat I could have. That could be a contact. There's a density limitation, bottom end limitations. You have to have more dense than a certain point. It's different depending on how long you've been in the league and things like how long that bat per company has been building that things like that there's some and then there's also a limit on how far you can cup the bat but you could max those out but the quick and dirty way that we have players kind of zone in on this in the midst of a chaotic season is batted ball spin rate

batted ball spin rate can be used as a quick and dirty proxy for how good am I making quality contact. Cause yeah, that makes sense. If you're spinning the ball. You jump in the cage, you can hit balls off a tee. You can do some quick front toss. You could even bring in a machine and start looking at the board.

Cause they can track that for you. You can look at that. So when we have players who are doing a performance test and they are swinging about that, let's just say that bat has much more mass in the barrel than they can handle. It is evident in the bat of all spin rate in that performance that we go that they are not able to manage the barrel.

Location like a lighter like a lighter model or maybe more shifting more of the mass towards the taper and the handle. Yep, absolutely. And the player halfway through that test is like, yeah, I'm cutting the ball with bat B, I can tell. Bat A, I'm making more solid contact. We just have a way of quantifying it now and it's really cool when we're collecting this data

during the test and we're like, oh, I think that that I think he's got some, his bat of all spin rates way too high with one bat over the other. And then he just says on his own, yeah, I'm totally cutting the ball. Something's going on with me and I, something about that a I like, and then we kind of let the test finish up so we don't bias the results. And then after it's all done, we explain what that player said matches exactly with what we see.

And then you can have some metrics on the bat that may have contributed to that feel. It's funny because I think that a lot of people, the first level of analysis on this was like, oh my God, they're cheating or like, this is crazy. We've never seen anything like this before. And then the second level was like, well, actually, we've seen this at spring training. Other guys have been doing it like, you know, some guys have done this. Some guys don't, you know, there's a given a take.

Third level has been like, well, why hasn't there been, you know, more, you know, of this kind of innovation in bats recently? I think maybe the answer is, you know, to some extent we didn't have the data on a lot of this stuff. Like bat-a-ball spin is relatively new and a lot of the Hawkeye stuff is relatively new. Is there any other sort of contributing factor to why, you know, sort of new bat technology hasn't been more widely accessed or available or, you know, what's, what are the industry factors? The visual on the torpedo bat is definitely an issue players have told me that just you

know putting it on the plate and getting ready to hit and looking at it just they don't like it takes you out of the zone. What I think a lot of players don't know is they're already swinging bats that are technically torpedoed as it is with the cupping. The diameter at the end of the bat is less than the diameter at the sweet spot on many models already. It's just not visibly evident and no one has sat it and I flashed at it. But you were also mentioning some industry factors.

I mean the wooden bat industry is tiny. There are very few potential customers. It's a small market that hasn't grown. So the only way to win if you're looking at it from the bat brand perspective, the only way to win is to take market share from your competitors or something crazy like a torpedo bat happens and now you've got customers who already have bats who would possibly be willing to buy more bats. And that's why in the last 48 hours, you have seen every single brand announce a torpedo

model and have some type of marketing language saying that it is the best thing for everyone when without at all considering the trade offs. So that would be my like closing point to any hitter of any age. It's a bat design decision and with any design decision there are trade-offs. So make sure you know who you are as a hitter and be able to do performance testing before you make a big change because the bats are just too precious. Yeah how many bats do you get in the big leagues? Yeah. The other thing is just like you you know, news that like now Victus and Maruchy is the official bat of MLB.

That's actually kind of a sponsorship deal. It's a, you kind of pay to be the official bat. You're the sponsor, but there has been a shift, I think, from Louisville Slugger to Victus and Maruchy. Maruchy seems to have really dialed in. I know that you've, I think you've worked with Marucci and Tucci maybe some, and like you've worked with these bat manufacturers.

Tell me just to close just a little bit about how you've helped clean up these processes because just them, the other part might be to be cynical is just like, well, if this is our group, then like, let's just make it as cheap as possible to make these bats. Because we're not getting more. Well, it makes sense that Marucci and Victus should be the official bat of Major League Baseball.

Now, they have the highest market share. If you team them together, they have the highest market share. So that all makes sense. As far as cooperating with the bat brands, it's very important because that's, that's the chapter we exist in now as, as a company is we're consulting with the bat brands. So the bats made for our clients are made to a higher standard. Long ball is the official bat optimization technology of seven bat brands, not those two big ones though, um, cause they have their own little arm and, but we cooperate with them as well.

And it's all about making sure the player gets the absolute best because like I said, at bats are quite precious. Well, that's awesome. Thank you so much for your time and explaining bat science to us and letting us into the bat world and best of luck to the one team that has signed with you. May all of their homers clear the warning track. Exactly. Awesome.

Wonderful. I appreciate it. This has been great. I can talk bats all day. Homer's clear the warning track. Exactly. Awesome. Wonderful. I appreciate it. This has been great. I can talk bats all day. Make sure to give us a like and rating on the various platforms. I'm so terrible at this part.

You know, normally Derek does this for me. That's it for this episode of Rates and Barrels. We'll be back with you tomorrow. Thanks for listening. Torpedo Bats.