Baseball is the king of misleading small samples. It’s usually best not to jump to any conclusions as the article does so early in the season (ban them! After 3 games?!). There is a lot of randomness in the data.
And if the season proves that these bats are indeed juicier than others? Probably MLB will let it lie. Offense is down enough already and all of the recent rules changes are intended to support offense.
basisword 3/31/2025|
Have they been using them in spring training? That's still early but a much better sample size if so.
adregan 3/31/2025||
Spring training at bats aren’t equivalent—hitters and pitchers aren’t approaching an at bat as they do in the regular season. But it’s no matter as we’re going to need to see a lot more plate appearances before the stats would be reliable indicators. Fangraphs[0] has a good guide to sample size. Slugging, for example, isn’t stable until 320 at bats. We’ll check back in mid July or so.
Also, we haven’t given pitchers a chance to adapt. Perhaps pitching outside (now a thinner part of the bat) will take the force out of the hit leading to softer contact.
Interesting outcome of Saturday's game -- most of the Yankee's runs came as a result of their 9 homers, and they let up 9 runs -- which, defensively, is not great. The Brewers scored an average 4.78 runs per game in 2024.
Kinda suggests the Yankees aren't all great at playing baseball, except for hitting home runs, but that's all that really matters.
vonmoltke 3/31/2025|
The defense in that game was pretty bad. Five of the nine Brewers runs scored due to errors, and it was five separate errors. The game yesterday went much better, defensively.
metalman 3/31/2025||
Love this!
I helped make wooden oars, that were used by competitors in international rowing competitions, that had blades designed by someone at MIT, back in the day, on a computer(golley gee), but we made them by hand, and as they were, only wood, they were legal for use, and all the champions used them.
we also made oars for "bostan bay bantry boat rigs" that won while crewed by inner city kids,
we cheated a bit, and snuck some carbon fibre in
but nobody even knew what that was, 18' oars, 2 kids to each, 16 oars per boat, plus the tiller.
ash for the majors was sometimes sourced from granpa's farm in Pa, which he was proud of, take me into the woods to.show how strait they were, and how the deer had et, everything down to the dirt.
next up, would be expoloring how a little texture
from a poorly finnished bat, might add a little energy transfer to the ball
vessenes 3/31/2025|
Rowing family here : what’s the current state of the art in oars?
metalman 4/1/2025||
what we were building was radical @ the time, and may still be.
The design of the blades was essentialy flat on one side, and had a more complicated profile on the back
the shaft was an I beam made from strait grained spruce, capped with ash, and then capped again in beach through the oar locks, and we snuck carbon fibre between the spruce and ash.
the longest oars were 18', and it was possible to put a handle under the bench, and a shop stand under the oar lock and go out and bounce up and down on the blades 15' out from the shop stand
we also made many oars for the international dorry races, which is regulated to "what could have been
built useing traditional materials and methods"
which ours were, cept for the cfd bieng done at mit
we also made paddles, and handles, but paddles do better now, in strait carbon, but oars need flex, and work as a spring
we had a couple of raceing skiffs at the shop and those sure are a hoot
vessenes 4/1/2025||
I’ve passed this on to the coach. She’s pretty traditional, but we’ll see what comes of it! Update: she’s impressed.
freetime2 4/1/2025||
Shouldn’t pitchers be able to adapt to this? If the sweet spot has moved, just pitch where the sweet spot isn’t.
jccalhoun 3/31/2025||
It would be fun to see how far you could hit a baseball or golf ball if you could make the bat/club out of any material. Or how fast someone could swim if you could wear anything (like those suits that were banned from the olympics) and things like that.
RajT88 3/31/2025||
Here is what I have learned from people who religiously follow various kind of sports which intersect with technology:
A new tech will be allowed to stand if everyone can take advantage of it equally AND it does not make the sport too boring.
Gotta get that ad and sponsor money.
gukov 4/1/2025||
Not a baseball fan, but I’m curious if the MLB will go the F1 route (ie ban the “hack”) or embrace it as it will probably make for more entertaining games. Home runs are a good thing, right?
globular-toast 4/1/2025|
After my initial surprise that teams have their own bats (presumably they don't have their own balls, though?), F1 was the first thing that came to mind. I don't follow F1 closely but I understand there is a constant struggle between allowing constructors to innovate (and thus having the constructors' championship in addition to drivers') and keeping the sport both fun and safe.
trhway 3/31/2025||
Sounds like those hammer head tennis rackets. Strange that it didn’t happen decades ago. And nothing wrong with such innovation just making game more fast and powerful.
The typical baseball bat's balance - very different from say a sword's - has always felt wrong to me, and i've just chalked it up to my not being a baseball player and thus not understanding. The new shape seems to improve the balance toward the centuries established for swords, etc.
Detrytus 4/1/2025|
I think that’s a good thing. As an outsider who only recently started following baseball I can say that what makes the game quite boring is a difficulty mismatch: throwing the ball is easy, hitting it is quite hard (many MLB players have batting averages of 0.250 or below) which means that a typical baseball game consists of many throws, many strike outs and only occasional hits an runs.