Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

thelibertyline.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 432 posts

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

#61

Post by kaycebasques »

happyopossum wrote: post #35
kaycebasques wrote: post #12

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.

For sure, that makes a lot of intuitive sense. I was thinking that there's a sweet spot with HRs. If it gets too common then it may be less of a dopamine hit. Kinda like how the randomness of slot machines is fine-tuned to maximize addictive potential.

However, one could argue the same thing about Curry and 3 pointers. My original argument suggests that seeing someone makes loads more 3 pointers would be boring. Yet it was very exciting to see him smash through previously unthinkable records. On the other hand, that was not driven by technological change…

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

#62

Post by pigbearpig »

Two players used the bats. I'm not a Yankees fan, but all these articles are making it seem like the bats are the reason. That does not explain why the rest of the lineup went off. Perhaps poor pitching is the better explanation. Too much is being made of these bats.

Also, golf club technology basically does the same thing. Everything is about making a bigger sweet spot. Oversize drivers and irons didn't seem to ruin the game.

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

#63

Post by toast0 »

jdsully wrote: post #39
cf100clunk wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The rules for hand pass are:

> Rule 79 – Hand Pass > 79.1 Hand Pass - A player shall be permitted to stop or “bat” a puck in the air with his open hand, or push it along the ice with his hand, and the play shall not be stopped unless, in the opinion of the on-ice officials, he has directed the puck to a teammate, or has allowed his team to gain an advantage, and subsequently possession and control of the puck is obtained by a player of the offending team, either directly or deflected off any player or official. For violations related to “closing his hand on the puck”, refer to Rule 67 – Handling Puck.

> 79.2 Defending Zone - Play will not be stopped for any hand pass by players in their own defending zone. The location of the puck when contacted by either the player making the hand pass or the player receiving the hand pass shall determine the zone it is in.

From the 2023-2024 rulebook [1], because it came up first in search. I don't think hand pass rules have changed. Basically, if your stick breaks when defending, you can go ahead and use your body to play and fling the puck to your teammates as appropriate (but not out of the defensive zone). OTOH, if your stick breaks when you're in the offensive zone, you better skate to the bench and either grab another stick or change out. Sometimes you'll see another player give their stick to the player with the broken stick and then go change.

[1] https://media.nhl.com/site/asset/public/ext/2023-24/2023-24R...

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

#64

Post by papercrane »

fishpen0 wrote: post #26
jparishy wrote: post #14

I think it's quite cool (disclaimer: I am indeed a dirty Yankees fan) Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you that has a fast pitch machine (usually maxes out 75-85mph which is 20+ mph less than your typical MLB fastball), give it a shot. When you hit the ball away from the sweet spot, especially on the parts closer to your hands, it really freaking hurts and throws o…

If every player ends up with a bat custom tailored to their swing this will get very interesting.

It could get even more wild. I could imagine batters having custom profiles for different pitchers. E.g. one bat for when hitting against someone who throws 100MPH four seam fastballs, and another when facing someone who throws 90 MPH cutters.

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

#65

Post by dontTREATonme »

jparishy wrote: post #14

I think it's quite cool (disclaimer: I am indeed a dirty Yankees fan) Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you that has a fast pitch machine (usually maxes out 75-85mph which is 20+ mph less than your typical MLB fastball), give it a shot. When you hit the ball away from the sweet spot, especially on the parts closer to your hands, it really freaking hurts and throws o…

> Brewer's pitching is injured, and the starter that day was a Yankee last year and the team is intimately familiar with his game.

Is this one of those situations where the Yankees are even still paying part of his salary?

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

#66

Post by jccalhoun »

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.

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

#67

Post by ARandumGuy »

happyopossum wrote: post #35
kaycebasques wrote: post #12

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.

While home runs are exciting, there are limits to that. For several years the MLB has been dealing with "three true outcomes", where a large percentage of at bats end in either a strikeout, walk, or home run.

While this can be exciting for individual at bats, it becomes pretty boring if it's too common. This is because it invalidates every role except the pitcher and batter, and removes a lot of strategy from the game. While this may be fine if you only watch the occasional game, it can get really dull if you watch a lot of games every season.

Home runs are a lot of fun! One of the things that makes baseball exciting is that every pitch has the potential to result in a home run. This adds a lot of tension to the game, and helps keep things engaging. But when home runs become too prevalent, it eliminates other fun aspects of baseball, and makes the game one dimensional and dull.

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

#68

Post by inerte »

floatrock wrote: post #34
Luc wrote: post #15

Cool but this article is AI slop. It's borderline unreadable, though I guess it looks great to Google.

I caught on when I realized the same sentence was being written for the fifth time.

I actually don't think this article is AI slop but instead a text length minimum so Google thinks there's enough content there. Now, I _could_ be an AI wrote it with this rule in mind, but the repetition feels more like the author said what they wanted to say and had to meet a word count quota, so they kept saying the same thing. At least this style of article has existed for many years before AI slop was even possible.

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

#69

Post by 91bananas »

fishpen0 wrote: post #26
jparishy wrote: post #14

I think it's quite cool (disclaimer: I am indeed a dirty Yankees fan) Hitting is really hard. If you feel up to it, and can find a public batting cage near you that has a fast pitch machine (usually maxes out 75-85mph which is 20+ mph less than your typical MLB fastball), give it a shot. When you hit the ball away from the sweet spot, especially on the parts closer to your hands, it really freaking hurts and throws o…

If every player ends up with a bat custom tailored to their swing this will get very interesting.

FWIW they already for the most part do have bats tailored to what they like to feel in their swings as far as where weight is, where the barrel begins, what shape it is, what the grip/knob feels like. I can't say how much data goes in to deciding what is used vs what they like to feel, this feels like more of a renaissance in attempting to use data somewhere else than brilliance in design.

My intuition tells me this whole thing is stupid and a fad, sure you might get slightly more mass behind the ball on perfectly barreled swings, but you get so few of those on the year already, were they already home runs of XBH on the old bat? And what are we losing on mishits with the skinny end of barrel, since after all hitting is more than just perfect swings caught in the right spot. Seems like more of a push towards feast or famine, 3 outcome baseball, which I personally just ain't a fan of.

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

#70

Post by daedrdev »

LeifCarrotson wrote: post #32
daedrdev wrote: 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 Chis…

Basically, these guys have such fine tuned biomechanics for hitting a baseball with just a few hundred milliseconds to decide wether to swing and where to swing, that trying to change their approach to hit further down the bat might ruin their hitting if they mess up. Far easier to shift the sweet spot.

Its not that they just need to get closer to the ball, their estimation if where a ball will strike their bat is slightly off.

Post reply on HN