The "torpedo" bat perfectly meshes with the Cardinals' new hitting approach

Baseball's most significant innovations have historically been met with resistance and taken several years to see widespread use. The baseball glove took about 30 years to become commonplace, and catchers' equipment took about 20 years to be fully implemented in the way it is today. A new, surprisingly simple change may be making waves throughout baseball in 2025, and the St. Louis Cardinals may need to get in on the action.

The New York Yankees are the talk of baseball after hitting 15 home runs in three games to tie a major league record. Perhaps more accurately, it's the Yankees' bats that are receiving attention. Many members of the team are adopting the "torpedo" bat, a unique construction in which the sweet spot of the lumber is moved a few inches lower, where players tend to strike the ball more often.

One of the Yankees trying out this new bat is former Cardinals first baseman Paul Goldschmidt. Goldschmidt has 5 hits in 12 at-bats this season, with a home run among them. In 2022, Goldschmidt adapted the "hockey puck" style bat handle, which he utilized to great success, winning the National League MVP award. During a 2024 season that saw him post career lows in many hitting categories, Goldschmidt worked tirelessly to find a solution to his struggles, and he might have found his solution in the Bronx.

The Cardinals have delivered in a big way themselves after the first three games of the season, in which they swept the Minnesota Twins, and new hitting coach Brant Brown is receiving plenty of credit for the Cardinals' new approach at the plate. Brown has preached the importance of situational hitting, and it has borne results, as the Cardinals had 11 two-strike hits in the Twins series.

These bats complement Brown's approach, as they were created to increase the margin of error to make contact and limit poor-quality contact. The Cardinals' recent approach of grinding out plate appearances could become even more potent if they are able to get a piece of good pitches and foul them off in two-strike counts.

The thought of adapting a bat to each hitter's tendencies is a scary one for pitchers around the league, and it would be another pendulum swing toward the hitters that baseball has been attempting to coax with actions such as the pitch clock and the ban of the shift. Cardinals fans are surely salivating over the idea of exit velocity extraordinaires Lars Nootbaar and Jordan Walker being able to hit pitches with even more force.

On the pitching side, many of the Cardinals' hurlers could be in trouble, as many of their arms are of the pitch-to-contact variety, although the Cardinals are attempting to move away from that style of play. The Cardinals may need to try to speed up that shift to strikeouts if these individualized bats make more waves around baseball.

Even if the Cardinals resist these new bats at first, they may become forced to adapt if these catch on throughout the league. However, the Yankees have played only three games, and the bats' effectiveness could be more of an illusion rather than producing numbers that can be sustained throughout the year.

Much like the puck handle bats, which first received attention in 2021 before becoming mainstream the next season, these "torpedo" bats likely won't be an immediate hit. But if the Yankees continue to produce, the Cardinals may jump on the bandwagon. The Cardinals have been chastised for being slow to adapt to the sabermetric revolution, so if these bats have the staying power, the team needs to buy in.