SAN FRANCISCO — There are a lot of challenges to playing at Yankee Stadium, some obvious and some subtle.
Giants pitchers will spend the next three games trying to keep the Yankees away from the short porch in right field, and the team’s young players will attempt to settle the butterflies that always come with the bright lights of New York. Then, of course, there’s the matchup with Aaron Judge, who certainly has enjoyed reminding the Giants of what they missed out on in MLB free agency two offseasons ago.
There will be an added layer this weekend, though. The “torpedo bats” are spreading throughout the league, but they still are most connected to the Yankees, who made the new bats a national storyline by destroying the Milwaukee Brewers’ pitching staff on the opening weekend of the season.
The Yankees hit 15 homers over three games, many coming off the barrels of the new bats, which are designed to shift more wood to the part of the bat where a specific player makes contact. They look a bit like bowling pins, and soon some of them will be in the Giants’ clubhouse. That’s something their president of baseball operations is on board with.
“Absolutely, I would try it,” Buster Posey told NBC Sports Bay Area. “I would try it for sure. I’ve thought about it quite a bit and I used a really deep-cut bat. For those out there that don’t know what that means, at the end of the bat, you can either have just a flat, rounded end or you can bore out the end of the bat. The reason I did that was to me it was, like, I want to move the density of the bat more towards the sweet spot because I didn’t want to hit the ball off the end.
“The torpedo bat takes it to another level where, from my understanding, you can kind of customize it to where you most likely hit the ball. If you increase the density of barrel size, yeah, I’m all for that.”
Some of Posey’s players will soon get a chance to try them out. More than half of the lineup has shown interest in using torpedo bats, but production has been slow since they became the biggest talking point in the sport. After the Yankees popularized them, players from every team placed orders. That created a backlog, as some Giants found out in recent days. Tyler Fitzgerald laughed Wednesday and said he ordered two but he’s still waiting; his bat company can’t keep up with the demand.
“I am very interested in trying it. Very interested,” Fitzgerald said. “It’s just trying something new out. I don’t know how it’ll go, but I switch bats a lot anyway. I’d like to take a look at it and see how it goes.”
The feeling in the clubhouse was generally summed up by Patrick Bailey, one of the first Giants to ask clubhouse employees about placing an order for torpedo bats. Asked on Wednesday if he’s still looking to try one, he smiled and shrugged.
“Why not?” Bailey said. “I’ll grab it and see how it feels.”
A switch-hitter, Bailey currently uses two different styles of bats. He said he’ll try a torpedo out in batting practice and see if he likes it, a common theme among Giants players. Mike Yastrzemski is off to a strong start, but he’s still curious to see if he can be even better at the plate with a new style. He’s also looking forward to trying one out in BP.
“I ordered them but I don’t know where they are right now,” Yastrzemski said. “But if there’s a chance of them working, you should try. I’ll see how it feels and go from there.”
The Giants had their analytics department do research early in the season and determine where players were making contact most often, and on this homestand, players’ bats were examined to get further information. This is a sport that can be slow to evolve, but it didn’t take long for hitters to get on board.
Every night, they’re tasked with facing the nastiest pitches the game has ever seen, many of which are designed in pitch labs using high-tech cameras. This seems like one way to regain an edge and MLB has already ruled that the bats are legal.
The Giants are waiting for their first orders to arrive, and also are keeping an eye on how they impact the game in general. Manager Bob Melvin guessed that players who are comfortable using torpedo bats might inch up on the plate a bit more, but the sample size thus far is too small.
“I’m sure everybody will be kind of curious about it now,” Melvin said.
That includes one of the best catchers the game has ever seen. Posey will never get a chance to use a torpedo bat in a game, but he’s hopeful that some Giants like using them. For now, the Giants are leaving all decisions up to the hitters themselves.
“It’s such a personal decision. It’s not something I would ever push, unless the data becomes overwhelming, and then we might push a little bit more,” Posey said, smiling. “But I do think it’s a personal decision.”
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