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MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

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Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

#31
post #22

I've always wondered what the technological development of F1 would look like in other sports. This feels pretty close.

There are stories like this in marathon running shoes (something like 3D printed to the athlete's exact gait and basically last just a single race) and swimming (the michael phelps olympics dolphin suit).

I'm sure cycling and golf have been doing things like this since forever.

Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

#32
post #4

This seems to most help with guys who were hitting the ball most often not at the sweet spot. By moving the sweet spot to where they are hitting the ball, they might gain some power. A bat needs to be round, a solid piece of wood, less than a certain length and less than a certain diameter. The actual shape is not defined.

It's interesting to me, who is not a baseball player but a software engineer, that even at the level of professional sports the solution is not to just train the athletes to swing the ideal bat "correctly" but to redesign the bat to be sub-optimal but such that when the players use it "wrong" the right thing happens.

The physicists and swing coaches and trainers and teammates have probably been telling Volpe and Chisholm for almost 2 decades to make contact at the tip of the bat instead of closer to their hands. But the solution turned out to be adjusting the bat and not the swing. Fascinating.

I can sit in my office and deliberate on the location of buttons and indicators on the screen and come up with the objectively best arrangement per ISA 101 high-performance HMI standards, but if operators keep making messes because their intuition about that system is wrong, maybe I should just change the way the machine operates to match.

Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

#35

If only the Yankees get access to it (e.g. they patented it and won't let other teams use it) then I could see it as an unfair advantage. In most other areas of America life, though, this innovation would be allowed or even celebrated. I imagine it will go the way of the brilliant strategic innovation a few years back of shifting defenders heavily depending on the batter's statistical hitting patterns. It'll get bann…

> If home runs happen all the time, they lose their excitement.

TV ratings show otherwise - in every instance so far, HRs put butts in seats, and defense makes people change the channel. TV and ballpark analytics show this to be true. The common thought is that's why the league ignored abuse during the steroid era so much.

edit - This is also the driving force behind multiple 'juiced ball' conspiracy theories.

Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

#36
post #29

Did it really take 125+ years for someone to realize the bat does not need to evenly taper? This seems like some seriously low lying fruit.

its less about even taper and more about moving weight/center of mass around. Youth bats have been doing that for quite a while. Camwood bats is a great example of moving weight around. In their case, its a training bat.

Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

#37
post #29

Did it really take 125+ years for someone to realize the bat does not need to evenly taper? This seems like some seriously low lying fruit.

its less about even taper and more about moving weight/center of mass around. Youth bats have been doing that for quite a while. Camwood bats is a great example of moving weight around. In their case, its a training bat.

Can you take it a step further with uneven wood density?

Like growing the tree with part of the branch under compression.

Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can put a basketball game on anywhere in the world, and people will watch it, even if they haven't watched basketball before. People only watch baseball out of tradition. MLB didn't even have a play clock until 2023, letting batters step out of the box at whim and create even longer periods with no action.

> You can put a basketball game on anywhere in the world, and people will watch it, even if they haven't watched basketball before What the heck is this confident assertion based on?

From showing basketball to people who haven't watched a basketball game before.

Re: MLB says Yankees’ new “torpedo bats” are legal and likely coming

#39
post #22

I've always wondered what the technological development of F1 would look like in other sports. This feels pretty close.

When the National Hockey League allowed synthetic sticks (aluminum, carbon fibre) in the late 1980s there was a quick uptake as players began to learn how to get greater puck velocities over the old wooden ones. The cost to the game is the phenomena of the exploding stick, which happens far more often than with the old lumber ones and can directly affect the outcome of the game as the dejected player skates away from…

They actually try to just block without the stick until the play ends and it looks rather silly. I've also seen them dive and punch the puck which doesn't seem like it should be legal but the rules seem to be limited to prohibiting grabbing the puck.
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