A certain joke has been making the rounds for a while now. It’s really simple. It goes, “Tommy Edman, power hitter? [Pause for laughter].” I made this joke myself during the Tokyo Series. If and when the joke is actually funny, it’s because Edman doesn’t have the traditional look or profile of a power hitter. That kind of incongruity makes a great premise both for jokes and for a startlingly high proportion of children’s movies. A switch-hitting, 5-foot-9 utility player who wants to be a power hitter is roughly as quirky as a rat who wants to be a gourmet chef, a robot who wants to find love, or a snail who wants to be a race car driver.
Edman never reached double-digit home runs until he got to the majors, and he has still never hit more than 13 in a season. However, I think it’s time we changed our inflection. Tommy Edman is a power hitter, or at the very least, he’s half a power hitter. That might come as a surprise, even to those of us who have been rooting for him (and thinking of him as Cousin Tommy) ever since his debut in 2019.
All three of those home runs are from this year, and all three were hit harder than 108 mph. Edman’s eight homers this season are tied for sixth in baseball. He also ranks 27th among qualified players in slugging percentage (.514) and 16th in isolated slugging percentage (.271). However, it goes without saying that a hot start like this won’t last forever. Edman is hitting the ball hard, but his bat speed is still well below average. He’s succeeding by pulling tons of balls in the air, and while I would love to see him hold onto those gains like high-contact guys Daniel Murphy and Justin Turner before him, we’ll have to wait and see where things settle. For that reason, I don’t necessarily want to focus on this power surge. I want to think bigger. Read the rest of this entry »
Over his first five starts, Aaron Nola is 0-5 with a 6.43 ERA. On Monday night against the Mets, Nola nearly put up his best performance of the season, allowing two earned runs over six innings before things went off the rails. In the seventh inning, the two runners that he bequeathed to the bullpen scored, leaving him with a final line of 6 1/3 innings and four earned runs. Still, it was an improvement.
No one has more losses or fewer wins than Nola this season. Only three qualified pitchers have a higher ERA. How much should we be panicking right now? I will tell you up front that I don’t know the answer. There’s plenty going on, and I don’t know how to make all the pieces fit neatly, so I’m just going to lay out what I’ve learned. Let’s start with a whole bunch of advanced ERA estimators. Read the rest of this entry »
We haven’t even reached May, but on Sunday, Elly De La Cruz made what will certainly go down as one of the best defensive plays of the 2025 season. In the bottom of the second inning in Baltimore, Reds opener Brent Suter clipped the outside corner with a slider and Jackson Holliday fought it off, sending a weak line drive up the middle off the end of his bat. The ball was ticketed for center field, but nobody told De La Cruz, who ranged to his left and did his best Superman impression. He seemed to hang in the air forever as he corralled what would have been the game-tying hit.
At this point, it’s possible that Superman is going to start doing an Elly De La Cruz impression. Truly, on this Easter Sunday, Elly was risen. De La Cruz got full extension, utilizing every inch of his 6-foot-5 frame. He sacrificed his face in the process, selling out for the catch so completely that he smacked his chin and the brim of his hat into the dirt when he finally landed. When the ball found leather, the Orioles fans who had started cheering in anticipation of an RBI single instead found their voices rising in both pitch and decibel level as their disparate vocalizations merged into one united “Awww!”
I spent a significant portion of my Monday morning watching this play on repeat, then searching for as many angles of it as I could. I wanted to see the catch, but even more than that, I wanted to see the reactions. You know how when you’ve watched your favorite movie enough times, you no longer need to keep your eyes on the focus of the frame at any given moment? You start to notice all the subtle things going on in the background, the way one extra covers their face to keep from laughing, or a tiny visual joke on a blackboard. After I’d marveled at De La Cruz’s athleticism until my eyes lost the ability to focus, I started watching everyone else marvel at it. Read the rest of this entry »
To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:
A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted;
A time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up;
A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance;
A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing;
A time to get, and a time to lose; a time to keep, and a time to cast away;
A time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak;
A time to love, and a time to hate; a time of war, and a time of peace.
– Ecclesiastes 3:1-8
On Thursday, Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Nathan Lukes welcomed a baby named Jett into the world. That same day, teammate Daulton Varsho was expecting to welcome his own baby. When I read the news, I did what anyone would do. I thought, “How wonderful for the Blue Jays,” and then I asked the internet to do some math for me.
Well that’s fun. Nine months before Lukes and Varsho became fathers, it was July 16, 2024. That date may ring a bell, because it was also the date of the All-Star Game. Lukes wasn’t in the majors at the time, but clearly, both players had very productive All-Star breaks. I decided it was time for a full investigation. Do baseball players make all their babies during the All-Star break? Read the rest of this entry »
It wasn’t supposed to go down this way. Oneil Cruz is 26 years old and still has as much talent as just about any player in baseball. Here’s what I wrote back in August, when the Pirates moved him to the outfield and I eulogized Oneil Cruz the Shortstop: “Cruz is still just 25. I do think it’s more likely that he’ll be fine in center, and possibly even great. Quite simply, there’s more margin for error in the outfield. He’ll take some bad routes and make some bad reads, but he’ll be able to make the most of his speed…” The early returns are not exactly making either Cruz or me look great.
Cruz spent 23 games in center to end the 2024 season, and the results were mixed. His best grades came from Statcast, which had him putting up a very encouraging 2 OAA and 1 FRV. However, Cruz was credited with -3 DRS and -2.1 DRP. On a per-inning basis, the latter number made him one of the worst center fielders in baseball. Still, all those numbers included two errors, which loomed very large in such a small sample size. Outfielders tend not to make that many errors, but Cruz was brand new to the position. He was fast. He had a rocket arm. Even if all he did was cut out the errors, he’d be at the very least a decent center fielder. It was reasonable to assume that he would only get better out there.
He has not yet gotten better out there. Cruz is currently sitting on -8 DRS, -2 OAA and FRV, and -0.1 DRP. Among all outfielders, those numbers respectively rank worst, third worst, fourth worst, and fifth worst. The advanced defensive metrics work on different scales and they often disagree, but on this point they are unanimous: Cruz has been one of the very worst outfielders in all of baseball this season. According to DRS, Cruz is the least-valuable defender in baseball, full stop. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s April, which means that here at FanGraphs we’re contractually forbidden from overreacting to small sample sizes. Overreacting to defensive metrics, which require especially large samples before they stabilize, is an even graver offense, grounds for a written reprimand and public shaming. According to Statcast’s Fielding Run Values, the best non-catcher was worth 16 runs on defense last year. On the other hand, according to Weighted Runs Above Average, the best hitter in baseball was worth 93.8 runs. The sample sizes on defense are a lot smaller and most of the chances are routine, which limits the impact even the best or worst defender can have on the game. However, we’re not forbidden from having fun. Although the small sample sizes make it dangerous for us to draw sweeping conclusions, they make it easy for us to get granular, and nothing says fun like statistical granularity. Today, we’re looking for one thing in particular: specific moments in which we can see a player’s defensive metrics jump or fall by an integer in real time.
Oneil Cruz has already been the most impactful defender according to DRS, racking up a shocking -8 runs over 126 1/3 innings. How did he fall into this abyss? You’d have to dig through every play he’s made this season. It would take a whole article. Maybe I will write that article soon enough, but for now, I’m interested in the other side of the spectrum. Welcome, once again, to Small Sample Size Theater. Read the rest of this entry »
This seems like an apt moment to reexamine the concept of value. What is a relief pitcher worth? What is anything worth? The context matters quite a bit. In boom times, when you can barely remember a past in which the arrow pointed any direction but up, the upside feels so real that it’s hard to resist. Sure, a premier setup man with a short track record is a luxury, but what’s the harm in splurging? In the darker times, when the eggs sitting in your refrigerator have suddenly gone from basic staples to commodities so precious that you can’t afford to waste them on something as trivial as breakfast, you need to hunt for value wherever you can find it.
For an Astros team determined to reset its luxury tax penalty, that means trading away reliever Rafael Montero and eating 72% of the money remaining on his contract in order to be free of the other 28%. For the Braves, reeling from a series of early-season setbacks, that means taking a chance on the discounted Montero and his untested splitter in exchange for a player to be named later. Read the rest of this entry »
Hunter Goodman isn’t going to chase forever. We’re not even two weeks into the season. All the players with .400 batting averages will come back down to earth, and so will Goodman and his 54.1% chase rate. That’s right, I said 54.1%. If you’re a pitcher who misses the strike zone, odds are Goodman will help you out by swinging anyway. Sports Info Solutions has been tracking pitches since 2002, and in that time, no qualified player has ever run a 50% chase rate over the course of a whole season. Hanser Alberto reached 54% during the short 2020 season and Ceddanne Rafaela gave it his best effort in 2024 with a 49.5% mark (just ahead of 2023 and 2025 Salvador Perez), but that’s it. Goodman won’t stay above 50% either, but he is on a record pace at the moment, and his 66.1% overall swing rate is even further ahead of Randall Simon’s all-time record of 63.6% in 2002.
I’m less interested in whether or not Goodman will set a record – he probably won’t – and more interested in what’s going on with him right now. Coming into the season, his career chase rate was 42.8%. That’s plenty high, and it included some nine-game stretches in which he at least approached this level. But for the most part, when he was chasing at an extreme rate, his performance cratered, just like you’d expect.
When the blue chase rate line went up, the red wRC+ line went down. But that seemed to change toward the end of the 2024 season. I don’t think it’ll last, but at the moment, Goodman is running a 109 wRC+ despite an appalling dereliction of discernment. It’s not necessarily that he can’t tell the difference between a ball and a strike. As I write this on Tuesday, there are still five qualified players who haven’t walked at all. Goodman is not one of them, nor is he one of the 149 players who’s swung at a pitch in the waste zone. Read the rest of this entry »
You may have noticed that this is the Year of the Kick-Change. And you may have noticed that last year was the Year of the Splitter, and the two years before that were the Year(s) of the Cutter, and before those years came the Year of the Sweeper and the Year of the High Four-Seamer. You may have noticed that there have been a lot of Years lately, is what I’m saying. And that’s before we even get into the Summer of the Gyro Slider, the Month of the Death Ball, the Fortnight of the Vulcan Change, the Week of the Slip-Change, and the glorious Day of Rasputin’s Cradle. We seem to be living in some sort of pitch type zodiac calendar and I’d like to talk about why that is. If you’re a regular FanGraphs reader, I may not say any one thing that’s totally new to you, but I think there’s value in putting all the pieces together to give a sense of the way pitching has evolved in recent years.
When I interviewed for this job back in 2022, one of the questions I had to answer was, “What do you think is the story of baseball right now?” My answer was pitch design. It felt like every day we’d learn about some new innovation in training, technology, or biomechanics that allowed pitchers to discover new pitches and refine the ones they already had. Although plenty has happened over the last three years, if you asked me that question again today, I’d probably give you the same answer. Read the rest of this entry »
Like you, I have read roughly a thousand articles about torpedo bats in the last four days. The bats, which look funny to us right now and will look normal to us in a couple months, taper at the end and bulge slightly at the sweet spot. Like so many good ideas, transferring that mass from the end of the bat, where the batter doesn’t want to make contact, to the sweet spot, where they do, is so simple that it teeters back and forth between elegance and silliness. Reasonable people can smack themselves in the forehead and think, “How is it possible that nobody ever thought to do this before?” Reasonable people can also giggle at pictures of big chonky bowling pin bats.
This innovation was possible because the rules around bats are fairly permissive. The rulebook spends one page on bats and nearly three pages on balks. Given that those three pages do almost nothing to clarify what does or does not constitute a balk, one page for bats seems pretty slight. In fact, we can boil the rules down to one quick sentence. As Patrick Dubuque wrote on Monday for Baseball Prospectus, bats must be solid wood, round, shorter than 42 inches, and no wider than 2.61 inches. That’s pretty much it. Not only does that sentence not contain many rules, but those rules also give batters some serious latitude. No one on earth is using a 42-inch bat. That’s 64% as tall as Jose Altuve. Marucci and Louisville Slugger don’t even offer bats that are longer than 34 inches. Babe Ruth’s famously enormous bats topped out at 36 inches. Fungo bats top out at 37, which means they’d be perfectly legal to use in a game, and they’re not barely even half an Altuve. The rulebook might as well say that bats may only be as long as the Mississippi River.
Apparently, no one was approaching the diameter limits either. There’s a good reason for that. If you were to increase the width of the barrel to the maximum 2.61 inches, until recently, you’d also be increasing the entire head of the bat too. You’d end up with a bat that was too heavy, and more specifically, too top-heavy. You’d feel like you were swinging a sledgehammer. That’s way too much mass to add to the bat. Eventually, someone was going to realize that you don’t have to increase the entire head of the bat.
Brad Penner-Imagn Images
Researcher Erica Block found this idea (under the name the “bottle bat”) lurking in the American Journal of Physics all the way back in 1963, but the someone who finally made it happen was physicist Aaron Leanhardt, who taught at the University of Michigan for seven years. He is now the Marlins’ field coordinator and was working in the Yankees’ minor league hitting department when he had the idea. “It wasn’t until now that maybe anyone really thought about this, myself included,” Leanhardt told reporters. “You show up every day, you put the glove on you’re given, swing the bat that you’re given, you put the spikes on that you’re given and you go about your day as best as you can, and every now and then, it takes time to question what you’re doing. Couple of years ago, some of the hitters started questioning what they were doing and I just kind of responded to their questions.”
The answer to those questions is simple enough that the physicist can boil it down to a sentence. “It’s just about making the bat as heavy and as fat as possible in the area where you’re trying to do damage on the baseball,” Leanhardt told The Athletic’s Brendan Kuty. A ballplayer without a physics degree can sum it up too. Wrote Jazz Chisholm Jr. on social media, “you just move the wood from the parts you don’t use to the parts you do!” The parts you don’t use are the reason the torpedo bat works in the first place. As it turns out, you can break a bat down into three distinct parts. The example below uses Cody Bellinger’s traditional CB35 model, made by Louisville Slugger.
No wonder Bellinger ditched this hunk of mostly garbage for a torpedo bat.
The truth is that nothing matters but the barrel. When Statcast first started releasing exit velocity data, we naturally gravitated toward a player’s average exit velocity. However, smart people quickly started focusing on other metrics like maximum EV, 90th or 95th percentile EV, and best speed (which Baseball Savant has since renamed EV50). Those other metrics are useful specifically because they completely ignore weakly hit balls, which were skewing the sample. Here’s Tom Tango’s now classic graph that explains why they set the cutoff for hard-hit balls at 95 mph.
As he put it, that’s where exit velocity starts to matter. If you hit a ball off the end of the bat, you’re going to hit it weakly. If you remove some mass from the end of the bat, you’ll hit it even more weakly, but who cares? There’s hardly any difference between balls hit 80 mph and 60 mph. However, once you get past 90 mph, hitting the ball flush, that graph gets mighty steep. Every extra mile per hour really, really matters.
Leanhardt explained to ESPN’s Jeff Passan that he used the concept of a “wood budget” to think through the idea, getting more wood on the sweet spot without increasing the overall weight of the bat. “Every penny counts. The fact of the matter is you want your barrels to count the most. You want the most bang for your buck there.” Expanding and strengthening the sweet spot by packing it with as much mass and density as possible helps toward that goal. Adjusting the location of the sweet spot so that it’s right where you tend to make the most contact helps toward that goal. Traditional bats have junk in the trunk. Torpedo bats bring the trunk to the junk.
In order to get a better understanding of the forces at play, I reached out to Vivienne Pelletier, a PhD candidate in materials science at Arizona State University and one of the brightest baseball minds in the public sphere. She explained the finer points of collision efficiency and pointed out something really fascinating. Even after super-sizing the sweet spot, its exact center is still not the optimal place to hit the ball. As it rotates, the bat moves faster toward the head, meaning there will always be a spot just past the sweet spot where the fractional increase in velocity will be worth the fractional decrease in mass. “In a real swing the bat is rotating,” Pelletier told me on Bluesky. “Near your hands it moves slowly and at the head it moves fast, there’s this bat speed gradient. The actual max EVs hitters get come above the point of maximum collision efficiency (which we could call the sweet spot) because the bat moves faster up there.” Every bat has a sweet spot, and every batter’s goal should be to just barely miss it.
As it turns out, every batter has their own sweet spot too. I spoke to Andrew Aydt, Driveline Baseball’s assistant director of hitting, to talk about how torpedo bats could be customized. “When I first saw the torpedo bat come out or gain popularity,” he said, “that’s where my mind went with it too, because of Hawk-Eye being in all MLB stadiums now. Teams have very detailed measurements now from bat tracking and tracking the ball. They know exactly where guys are contacting the ball consistently. So I think this is actually a pretty big advantage for teams that have a good R&D department. They can suggest [based on the] overall average [location of contact] where they should beef up the barrel, or adjust the barrel down some or up some.”
Anthony Volpe, who tends to make contact closer to the bat’s label, had his sweet spot moved in that direction, said YES Network broadcaster Michael Kay during the second inning of Saturday’s game. While this should allow Volpe to increase his exit velocity by ensuring that his contact comes closer to the sweet spot, that location also means that his sweet spot will be moving slightly slower because it’s closer to the knob. Then again, the adjustment to the balance of the bat – lowering the moment of inertia, in physics terms – should allow him to swing the bat harder and to have better bat control, offsetting that loss. Pelletier, who has already run some numbers on the potential gains in exit velocity, explained, “The torpedo bat moves the sweet spot down, meaning that it moves somewhere that’s necessarily moving slower. So, even if you make slight gains on max collision efficiency your max EVs decrease as well.” Physics: Sometimes it’s complicated.
For players whose contact tends to come closer to the head of the bat anyway, the news is even more exciting. Adjusting the sweet spot in that direction would allow them both to make more contact at an optimal spot and to increase the bat speed at that spot (though it would also make the bat effectively heavier and worsen bat control some).
On Sunday, Tango posted the scatter plot below. It shows the contact tendencies of every player in baseball, limiting the sample to swings on which the hitter was on time and on target. He split them up into two categories: Those who get tied up (that is, make contact closer to the label) and those who flail (make contact closer to the head). As you might notice, Volpe is not where we’d expect him to be. He’s actually slightly on the flailing side of things. If anything, based on these particular data, his sweet spot should be pushed further toward the head of the bat. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s swinging the wrong torpedo bat. Additional data could’ve been used during Volpe’s bat fitting that supported sliding his barrel toward the label. “I don’t know that necessarily everyone knows about it,” said Yankees manager Aaron Boone in response to a question about whether league-wide offense would increase as more teams adopted torpedo bats. When asked to elaborate, Boone said: “I think there’s just a lot more that goes into it… a lot went into doing that for our individual guys.” Tango highlighted Jhonkensy Noel as a proud member of Team Tied Up who would benefit from moving his sweet spot closer to the handle.
The odd shape is the grabby part of the torpedo bat, but the fanfare of the last week could have a bigger effect, turbocharging the trend toward hyper-customized bats. “The bat is such a unique tool,” Ryan Jeffers told Passan. “You look at the history of the game, and they used to swing telephone poles. Now you try to optimize it, and it feels like some branches are starting to fall for us on the hitting side of things.” Batters have always tinkered, and plenty of trends have swept through the league before. In the early 2000s it was maple bats, and in recent years we’ve seen trends like axe handle bats and hockey puck knobs. Customization has increased steadily. Orioles hitting coach Cody Asche told The Baltimore Banner’s Andy Kostka, “I think if you’re around clubhouses, all 30 teams, you would see a guy or two who’s adopting a bat that is fashioned maybe more specifically for their swing.”
Aydt told me that Driveline started doing bat fittings around four or five years ago. “How much is there to change the bat, or individualize bats to help a player’s performance?” he explained, focusing on the moment of inertia again. “How fast they’re swinging the bat, how hard they’re hitting the ball, consistency. Basically, their collision efficiency (or what we call smash factor), how we can improve that for guys more often, any improvements ball-flight-wise… Since we don’t manufacture bats, it was more finding a good MOI for the guy that we think would help them perform the best. And then recommending bats if they wanted or taking that to their bat manufacturer.” In the last year or two, Driveline has focused less on bat fitting, because bat manufacturers have started doing their own fittings. Aydt mentioned that Marucci has a baseball performance lab for that very purpose. When he saw the torpedo bats take the league by storm, his mind leapt to even more advanced frontiers.
In the coming year or two, we’ll be seeing more torpedo bats specifically, and more bats that are customized to an individual player generally. But they could also be tailored for a specific situation. “I think they could even get more granular than that, having a range of bats made for guys,” Aydt said. “And then depending on that night’s starter or the matchup they’re going to see, they could decide which bat to go with… based off the pitch types they’re seeing, if the hitter misses more at a certain part of the bat based off different pitches or what they’re most likely to see that night. Or if guy has attacked more inside, attacked more outside consistently against that hitter… If they’re going to be facing a ton of velo that night and they’re a guy who doesn’t consistently hit velo well, it could be a good thing to lower that MOI. So that would be moving more of the mass closer to the hands, which is essentially lowering the swing weight. So it’s easier for them to get up to speed quicker, improving the acceleration of the bat to help them catch up to velo.”
Maybe you’re like Rafael Devers and starting the season with a disastrous run of strikeouts because you’re behind on absolutely everything. You’d be a good candidate for a Volpe bat with a lower MOI, helping you get around quicker. Maybe you’re facing a pitcher who loves to attack the outside corner. It might make sense to try a bat with a higher MOI and more mass toward the head. Aydt even raised the possibility of having a two-strike bat. When you fall behind, the bat boy runs out to hand you a bat with a lower MOI so that you can prioritize quickness and barrel control over power.
Eric Hartline-Imagn Images
It’s also possible the torpedo bats will be banned, as one front office source predicted to R.J. Anderson of CBS Sports. If we do see ball boys running out to trade bats every time a hitter falls behind in the count, the league might feel it has to act. It certainly wouldn’t take a particularly dramatic rule change. The rules would just need to specify that no part of the bat may have a diameter bigger than the diameter at a point, say, one inch from the end. It might not even push the bat section of the rulebook past a page.
As with any innovation, buy-in will be a big limiting factor. There will always be old-school baseball men eager to object on principle to any innovation. “When I got jammed, I figured out what I had to do to stop that,” said Angels manager Ron Washington, who ran a lifetime 77 wRC+. “So I didn’t worry about putting more weight in a certain area of the bat.” Current players are much more open to new ideas and technology. Some will be comfortable trying something new, or even following Aydt’s idea and tailoring their bat to the situation at hand. Others will value comfort and consistency. “It is the talk of the game right now,” said Aydt, “but it’s not going to be good for every single hitter.” Said Leanhardt, “Credit to any of the players who were willing to listen to me, because it’s crazy. Listening to me describe it is sometimes even crazier.”
According to The Athletic’s Sam Blum, the Yankees developed torpedo bats in 2022, while the Cubs started working with them last season. Brandon Lockridge was a minor leaguer in the Yankees system at the time and now serves as the small spoon in San Diego’s left field platoon. Lockridge told Blum that when Leanhardt was originally pushing players to try the bats, his pitch wasn’t about exit velocity, but rather about using the bigger barrel to turn some whiffs into foul tips. It’s possible that over the course of 600 plate appearances and 1,000 swings, an extra fraction of an inch could save a player from a third strike or two. However, it’s hard to imagine that this selling point was sexy enough to convince players to try something that looks so different from what they’re used to. Hitters depend on feel. If they’re not comfortable with a bat, no amount of evidence will persuade them to use it.
That’s where the name comes in. You have to imagine it’s more about marketing than anything else. As anyone who’s watched The Hunt For Red October a couple dozen times can tell you, torpedo bats actually look less like torpedoes than traditional bats do, because most torpedoes taper only ever so slightly at the end. What torpedo bats actually resemble is old-timey bombs or pregnant whales.
(Editor’s note: We consulted FanGraphs writer Michael Baumann, who’s seen The Hunt for Red October a couple hundred times, about the torpedo shape issue. His response was very involved and to be honest we started zoning out when he used the word “supercavitating.”)
But as anyone who’s worked for a major league team will tell you, all the evidence in the world won’t help an idea if you can’t sell it to the players and coaches. So while the torpedo bats may have exploded into the public’s consciousness this past weekend, their place in the game owes itself in some degree to Leanhardt’s salesmanship and the open-mindedness of the Yankees, not to mention the bat manufacturers who had to learn how to make them. None of us was there, but I will leave you with a dramatization of Leanhardt’s efforts to get these bats into the hands of the Yankees. I present to you a play in three acts.
ACT ONE
PHYSICIST: Pardon me, young baseball man. Would you be interested in experimenting with our new bowling pin bats? My calculations say that they might help you get more foul tips. [Receives wedgie.]
ACT TWO
PHYSICIST: Hello there, fellow Yankee. Might I be able to persuade you to take a couple whacks with our new juggling club bats? They ever so slightly alter the moment of intertia, and preliminary results indicate that this alteration just might result in an increase in — you know what, I’ll just shove myself into this locker.
ACT THREE
PHYSICIST: Sup, bro. Wanna try this sick-ass torpedo bat? Scientifically proven to make the ball [lowers sunglasses] explode.
