As the baseball public learned the term "torpedo bat" following the New York Yankees' home run barrage to open the 2025 MLB season, it seemed as if the Bronx Bombers had discovered a cheat code. Despite criticisms of their lineup entering the season being Aaron Judge and eight relative question marks, the Yankees scores 36 runs and went 3-0 in their opening series against Milwaukee.
Since that time, though, the Yankees have fallen back to Earth in every capacity. They're just 4-5 since that red-hot torpedo bat-induced start to the season. Even worse, though, the offense has seemingly gone quite cold. In their most recent series in which they dropped two out of three to the Detroit Tigers while scoring more than two runs just once, getting shut out in one of the losses, and managing just six total runs across the three-game set.
So maybe the torpedo bats aren't actually the panacea for the Yankees offense after all.
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Yankees offensive slump isn't fixed by torpedo bats
One of the big things that ultimately doomed the Yankees, outside of Juan Soto, in the World Series a year ago was their inability to put bat to ball. As the shine and the potential benefits of the torpedo bat appear to be wearing off, though, that problem is once again rearing it's ugly head.
Looking back at the Brewers series, the Yankees were simply making hard contact and tearing the cover off of the ball with, per Baseball Savant, xWOBAs (expected weighted on-base averages) of .313, .587 and .501. They were making contact and good contact at that.
Contrast those numbers with the Tigers series, though, and you can see the stark change. Their xWOBA in the three games of the series were .278, .190 and .368. Go figure, the one game in the series at Detroit that they got above .300 there was also the one game that the Yankees were able to win.
What this really shows, though, is that the Yankees are simply falling into the old bad habit of not being able to put together good at-bats and make good contact. With the torpedo bats and the denser barrels, there's a reason the xWOBA was so high against Milwaukee — they were putting bat to ball and it was being hit hard. If you're not even giving the bat a chance to work its magic, though, then it doesn't matter what type of bat is in a player's hand at the dish.
This isn't to say that this isn't a problem that won't ultimately get better. The Yankees were notoriously hot and cold throughout much of last season when it came to the offense. It could be more of the same, only that the hot streaks might be even hotter thanks to the new bats. At the same time, though, the fact that the issues of old haven't gone away is concerning and it's something that putting more wood on the sweet spot isn't going to fix.