Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know that the biggest story of the first week of the 2025 MLB season is “torpedo bats,” the oddly shaped lumber that burst onto the scene thanks to the Yankees’ offensive explosion over the weekend and have continued to dominate baseball conversations this week.

While Aaron Judge rocked three homers using his normal bat, a number of Yankees opted for the Torpedo bat, which was designed in part by former Massachusetts Institute of Technology physicist Aaron Leanhardt and are notable for being densest at the barrel, or the "sweet spot" of the bat.

They look like baseball bats morphing into bowling pins, their ends flaring into an aggressive bulge that suddenly tapers. So how do they work?