iBrainTech has worked with some of the biggest names in soccer, including Juventus, and now they are seeking to deliver their neurocognitive training tool to the ranks of academy soccer.
Main photo: iBrainTech
Users wear an EEG headset, which monitors brain activity and translates intention into action on the screen. The goal is to help soccer players sharpen their decision making and execution. It has been adopted by clubs in Serie A (Juventus), MLS (Orlando City SC and formerly Atlanta United), LaLiga (Real Sociedad) and the Portuguese Primeira Liga (SL Benfica). Longtime MLS star Jonathan Bornstein was an avid user.
Now, i-BrainTech is seeking to broaden its reach to academy and youth players. It’s a well-trodden path for performance tech to prove themselves with the elite before reaching the larger consumer market. But i-BrainTech has both the advantage of its inherent gamification and the challenge of making complex tech more frictionless.
“All transformative technologies should be ready and willing to become accessible, to validate the impact on the top level of performance and then to allow access of youth,” i-BrainTech Co-Founder/CEO Konstantin Sonkin said. “You need to be ready to cater your value to the young generation, and we are so lucky to be an engaging game at the end of the day.”
Sonkin has been working on this technology for 15 years to balance high signal quality with ease of use. He described a remodeled product as “a top-level, consumer-ready headset.” The goal is not only to improve the performance of younger players but also to encourage more athletic participation and unlock new revenue streams for clubs, such as with a co-branded cap or content.
“We want to drive them from Instagram back to the pitch,” Sonkin said. “Because when you exercise your mind, you’re so eager to execute in the [physical world] because your brain got so excited. It’s called neuro-priming. It has excessive, let’s say, electricity. It wants to utilize that in real-world actions, and that is the connection between their content created by clubs and then a long lifetime value.”
Michita Toda previously used i-BrainTech with rehabbing players as a physical therapist at Orlando City, where he saw value in keeping injured players mentally sharp while physically recovering. He recently joined the North Carolina Courage as its Head Athletic Trainer and is hoping to bring the product there, both for the NWSL club but also for the associated men’s USL team, North Carolina FC, as well as for the large youth academy system in the area.
“Being on the medical side of things, we talk a lot about youth sports specialization and how the more they play at a younger age, that might make them more susceptible to injury,” Toda said. “Well, using technology like this to supplement what they’re already doing, but not overdoing it physically, they still get the mental reps and get the quote-unquote ‘practice’ without having to tax their body.”
Members of the Juventus Residency Academy train with i-BrainTech. (Photo: iBrainTech)
Limited studies have shown promising results with the transfer of skill from the i-BrainTech product to the pitch. Real Sociedad B — the LaLiga club’s reserve team, which competes in the Spanish third division — completed a 15-player case study that spanned three months and 12,500 visualized actions. Those using i-BrainTech improved 12.4% in the accuracy of long kicks compared to 2.6% in the control group. Five of the eight players using i-BrainTech’s neurofeedback training also reported better concentration in matches.
“When we actually repeat all the actions on the pitch, most of the time we train our mind-body connection,” Sonkin said. “We train our muscle memory. Muscle obviously doesn’t have any memory. Memory lives in the brain.”
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
In the second episode of our three-part series, the AIS’s Director of National Performance Support Systems discusses how tech can be better used to deliver insights to athletes and coaches.
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“One of the things we’re trying to figure out, particularly for fresh graduates coming into high performance, is that sense of pressure to utilise technology because that’s what’s seen to be done in high performance,” she tells Teamworks’ Andrew Trimble and Leaders John Portch.
Miranda is the Director of National Performance Support Systems at the Australian Institute of Sport and a practising physiotherapist, which made her an ideal guest on this special Teamworks Vodcast, particularly when it comes to sharing her perspective on the way the Australian sports system uses technology.
“The next step is ensuring practitioners have got the critical thinking skills to understand why I am using this and what is it adding. What is it telling me? It’s getting that ability to analyse.”
Her words bring to mind High Performance Unpacked, the Teamworks Special Report that spoke to the importance of the practitioner optimising a given tech product to the final user.
It resonated with Andrew too. “When you haven’t got a centralised mechanism for presenting and communicating data, it shines a light on how important it is to be done correctly,” he says. “The greatest dataset in the world, if not communicated correctly, is nowhere near as effective and may be detrimental.”
Elsewhere in this episode, Miranda and Andrew discuss the idea of the physio room as the heartbeat of the team; the balance between system and individual performance [29:30]; why the physiotherapist is a ‘life coach’; and bridging the evidence gap in female athlete health.
Check out Episode 1, with Simon Rice, the Vice President of Athlete Care at the Philadelphia 76ers:
Listen above and subscribe today on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Overcast, or your chosen podcast platform.
The MyTOCA app is also helping TOCA Soccer to stay more engaged with their soccer trainees away from the practice facility.
Main photo: TOCA Football Inc
“We’ve been collecting more and more data, but there really became this gap, if you will, from a customer’s perspective,” TOCA Founder Eddie Lewis said. “We had a lot of really powerful training data, but we made it really difficult to consume and collect.”
Lewis said a clear goal emerged to make an app that was engaging, but also one that easily displayed the value of TOCA training session. He told SBJ that the entire process to build the MyTOCA app started with a complete teardown of its existing platform, which struggled to collect data. The re-engineered setup creates more personalization for players but also helps TOCA stay more engaged with their soccer trainees outside of the facility walls.
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“The ability to take a player, use the data to not only understand where they are — but also understand insights that would be very difficult to see necessarily from the naked eye unless you spent a ton of time with these players, and then attack those strengths and weaknesses from a training perspective — we think is really valuable,” Lewis said. “And not only that, we want to share that progression along the way. At the end of the day, we believe the higher the training, the higher the customer satisfaction and obviously, the longer retention.”
The app has a trophy room for players to look at their accomplishments, as well as a community leaderboard and internal booking feature. Lewis also mentioned that this is the first phase of MyTOCA, setting the stage for more rollouts like a planned TOCA Score metric.
The deployment coincided with the start of the second annual TOCA Skills Showcase, an event rolled out in partnership with the MLS that spans two months in a competition across 22 TOCA Soccer centers. TOCA Football entered a 10-year partnership with the league at the end of 2022. Lewis added that the pairing has created both “validation and certainly credibility in terms of what we’re doing from a training perspective.”
Regarding the opening of the first TOCA Social site in Dallas, Lewis said there’s no specific date to share yet. But the goal to open ahead of the 2026 World Cup remains in an effort to capitalize on the nationwide interest that will build as kickoffs get closer.
“Everyone’s going to be interested in a in a soccer-related story, or understanding what’s going on with soccer in the US,” Lewis said. “And I think if we’re not ready to step into that spotlight during that window, we miss a once-in-a-generational opportunity.”
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
In this recent edition of SBJ Tech’s Athlete’s Voice, the veteran Colombian midfielder is using Omorpho’s micro-weighted athletic apparel to maintain his fitness levels.
Main photo: Getty Images
The 39-year-old Colombian ranks in the top-10 in MLS history for games started and minutes played, and as he has gotten older, Chará has made training and recovery more of a priority. He recently became a brand ambassador for Omorpho, which places micro-weights on athletic apparel for training.
An Oregon-based company, Omorpho is a partner of Tracktown USA in Eugene and counts Olympic track and field athletes Michael Johnson and Vashti Cunningham among its other ambassadors. In May, Omorpho also partnered with Orangetheory Fitness.
On his introduction to Omorpho…
Last year I saw one of my teammates, Larrys Mabiala, using one of the G-vests from Omorpho, and I started looking for the shorts. I received a pair of shorts from Omorpho last year and started using them in the preseason. I was talking about the shorts with the fitness coach, and he told me it could be a good opportunity to start using those shorts in preseason. I got used to it, and I really like it because it helps a lot to keep the same fitness level, which is important for me for every game.
Diego Chará joins Olympic track and field athletes Michael Johnson and Vashti Cunningham as ambassadors for Omorpho. (Photo: Getty Images)
On how it feels to wear them…
They have micro-weights so in warmups it really brings that effort. I usually use those short for 30 minutes and warmup session. Once I take them off, I start feeling kind of light and that continues into the practice during the day.
On the effect of wearing them…
I saw they helped me a lot to keep the physical level. Because I play as a midfielder, I have to be a powerful guy, and I feel with the shorts, I find a way to keep the same level in the games as during trainings. At the same time, I noticed the shorts —after using for a period of time — helped me to improve in my bone density. This is trying to prevent injuries, and at the same time that density gives the players [the ability] to do harder loads and work out.
On why he tests new tech…
For me, it’s really important and more in this moment of my career because I just turned 39. It is a little bit harder to keep in the game. And for me using now the technology for Omorpho has been really good, amazing, and that helped me to keep in the game.
Chará, 39, ranks in the top-10 in MLS history for games started and minutes played. (Photo: Getty Images)
What else he has tried…
In my career it is many things right now. It’s not just the technology. It is used getting good health habits — sleeping well, getting diet — and now the team is using the [Oura] ring to [measure] how you sleep and the recovery process. I think that technology helps a lot.
On what he’d tell a younger version of himself about career longevity…
It’s no secret formula, but I think the effort, the discipline, has been crucial in my career. Giving that effort and at the same time be mentally strong that helped to get a long career.
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
US Olympic Sprint champion Gabby Thomas discusses VAMA, which is a new motion capture tool for helping world-class athletes use biomechanics to fine-tune performance.
Main photo: Getty Images
“Obviously, it’s fine,” Thomas added, “but it really frustrates me because I am a perfectionist, and I want to get better.”
Training used to be done by feel, with some help from video. Now, however, USA Track & Field — in collaboration with the USOPC and the Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) — is able to offer its athletes a markerless motion capture tool called VAMA (Video Automatic Motion Analysis) to analyze athletes’ biomechanics, both at the start and at top speed. Small changes can have big impacts at the boundaries of performance, especially in short sprints.
VAMA has become part of many American sprinters’ weekly routines over the past few years and, by the USOPC’s estimate, directly contributed to nine Olympic medals in Paris — not only by Thomas, but also by men’s 100-meter medalists Noah Lyles and Fred Kerley, women’s long jump winner Tara Davis-Woodhall and more.
Spearheading VAMA’s implementation is Tyler Noble, USATF’s lead sport science and data analyst, who visited Thomas at her final training session before heading to the Paris Olympics. At the time, Thomas said her starts had been “a little wonky.” Noble can use an off-the-shelf GoPro camera that costs about $200 and shoots at 240 frames per second, then run the video through the VAMA algorithms and receive biomechanical feedback.
Noble and Thomas’ coach, Tonja Buford-Bailey, focused on her stride length and the number of steps it took her to reach 10 meters, a measurable cue that helped Thomas focus on performing.
“I always welcome new data, and when you’re trying to be the best and get better by such small margins, all of that counts,” Thomas said. “Working with Tyler and their program is so helpful, because I can see in real time what I’m actually doing, and then take that feedback and make corrections immediately.”
Among the metrics VAMA — a finalist for Best in Athlete Performance Technology at the Sports Business Awards: Tech — is able to collect are joint angles, ground contact times and vertical force production. Essentially every elite American sprinter has undergone at least one assessment, helping build a library to improve the algorithms and the understanding of what matters.
“Because we use VAMA, we’ve got this very rich data set of our best starters, and so we can actually model where the first seven steps for any athlete should really be relative to, say, their height or their leg length,” Noble said. “We take a holistic approach to the demands of the race, given the constraints of the athletes, and then try to model the perfect plan. VAMA plays a huge role in that, because you’ve got to be able to get to those insights quickly.”
The technological origins of VAMA reside in diving — where Phil Cheetham, former USOPC Director of Sport Technology and innovation, first applied motion capture with the SwRI — and also in the expertise of Ralph Mann, a former world record-holding hurdler who later earned his PhD and pioneered biomechanical analysis in sprinting.
Noble described Mann, who passed away at age 75 in January, as “the grandfather of USATF sports science” and added, “He had this beautiful, unique blend of PhD book smarts with ‘I won a silver medal at the Olympic Games.’ He could speak the science and coach the athlete.”
USATF used Mann’s CompuSport technology for years, but during the pandemic, budgets were decimated. Needing an alternative, it repurposed VAMA from diving to running. The analysis helps inform the conversations that “each coach-athlete pairing needs,” Noble said.
USOPC Performance Innovation Lead Elliot Schwartz praised Noble’s combined expertise in data analytics and sport sciences — not to mention that he’s a former college runner — to steer the project. Noble travels regularly to visit coaches and runners, but they can also upload videos for VAMA analysis on their own.
“Having an analysis tool like VAMA means that, one, you get much more accurate measurements, but also you can support so many more athletes,” Schwartz said. “A big part of what this technology is doing is it’s really democratizing who receives performance support.”
Sometimes that support can be a little inadvertent. Noble had two cameras set up to capture data on Olympic silver medal-winning hurdler Daniel Roberts prior to the Games. In the background, long jumper Davis-Woodhall had an absolutely perfect jump that her coach, Travis Geopfert, measured at 7.17 meters, a couple of inches longer than her eventual gold medal-winning distance in Paris.
By a “lucky circumstance,” Noble said, the last eight steps of her approach to the jump were captured by the second GoPro camera. That enabled him to share her step lengths and pattern as a final reinforcement of what Davis-Woodhall should do in competition.
“That was just a quick, off-the-cuff [analysis] that would have been very difficult and time-consuming to do in the past,” Noble said.
Lyles and Kerley won gold and silver in the Olympic 100, but their predictive modeling needed to take into account that Lyles, at 5-foot-11, is four inches shorter than the 6-3 Kerley. When Noble assessed them shortly before the Games, he knew Kerley would reach 10 meters first, but Lyles would get there while moving at a faster speed. Given each race strategy, Noble projected Lyles as a slight favorite — and indeed he won in a photo finish, edging Jamaica’s Kishane Thompson by five-thousandths of a second and Kerley by two-hundredths.
“There’s not much you can really tweak or change a week before the 100 final,” Noble said, “but you can go up and you can show Noah the iPad, or you show Fred the iPad, and say, ‘Look, you are ready to go.’”
VAMA technology helped the U.S. win nine medals at the Paris Olympics by USOPC estimates (Photo: USPOC).
We take a holistic approach to the demands of the race, given the constraints of the athletes, and then try to model the perfect plan. VAMA plays a huge role in that, because you’ve got to be able to get to those insights quickly.
Tyler Noble, USATF lead sport science and data analyst
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
FlyKitt has been adopted by US Soccer and numerous players traveling to and from Europe during international breaks. It uses algorithms to prescribe a protocol of supplements, blue light-blocking glasses and recommendations on meal and sleep timing to mitigate jet lag from international travel.
Main image: courtesy of FlyKitt
That product, built from the data collection and personal coaching services of what was known as Fount, worked so effectively — better than 90% success rate — that its sales quintupled in a six-month period last year. At that point, CEO Andrew Herr decided to focus more intently on helping people travel, and along with CTO Clayton Kim, developed FlyKitt Fit, an app-based AI tool that generates custom exercise plans for travelers.
With FlyKitt Fit, a user can take photos of a hotel gym — or any fitness center — and the app will automatically identify the available machinery. Someone then needs to enter exercise goals, time available and current muscle soreness, and then FlyKitt Fit will generate a workout program.
“One of the big conclusions from our work was that travel was a top three challenge to people’s health, and no one was addressing it,” Herr said. “With that rapid growth, we just saw the opportunity to really use all of the accumulated data and knowledge to build products to go after travel, and so what we’re doing is we’re building the toolkit to solve every part of the health challenges of travel.”
Over time, FlyKitt Fit will include more domestic travel aid and be more deeply intertwined with the jet lag product with inputs based on one’s circadian adjustment and optimal exertion based on recent rest. “We’re moving towards integrating this more into the FlyKitt program, but right now it’s really focused on getting you the best workout you can get when you’re on the road,” Herr said.
The genesis of FlyKitt originates from Herr’s time as a human performance specialist in the US Army — he was twice honored with a ‘Mad Scientist’ award — and his understanding that flying creates an inflammatory response akin to what divers experience at great depths. Suppressing that underlying inflammation allows circadian rhythms to more easily adjust. The parent company raised a $12 million Series A in 2023.
US Soccer is one of the known sports users of the FlyKitt product, both for team travel to international matches and for shuttling European-based players to and from camps back in the States.
Also on the product roadmap is FlyKitt Food. The tool, which is currently in beta, helps users find healthy meal options while traveling. The technology ingests publicly available menus and can recommend not just a certain restaurant but even a specific dish, complete with modifications such as whether to get the dressing on the side.
“We know from our coaching service both the types of meals that are going to be most effective at powering people when they travel,” Herr said. “It’s a generally healthy protocol, but it’s also really the optimal stuff to be eating when you travel. We know all the food sensitivities and food issues that make it hard not just to find a healthy restaurant, but find a healthy restaurant for you.”
This article was brought to you by SBJ Tech, a Leaders Group company. As a Leaders Performance Institute member, you are able to enjoy exclusive access to SBJ Tech content in the field of athletic performance.
The torpedo bat enhances exit velocity and optimizes swing mechanics. Here its story as told by 16 players, front office executives, batmakers and other insiders.
Main image: Bloomberg via Getty Images
Attached to the message sent to Brad Hillerich, who leads the production of pro products, was a CAD file from an MLB team analyst. It included a 3D-rendered wood baseball bat whose shape was unlike anything either Hillerich had ever seen. Brad called Bobby and they took a look at its bulging barrel and jarring taper.
“Oh, man, it was kind of like looking at a Tesla truck,” Bobby recalled. “[People say] ‘that’s not a truck,’ and we looked at it and said, ‘That’s not a bat.’ But we just said, ‘Listen, these guys are physicists. They’ve done their research, and the least we could do is turn it into a usable product and see what happens with it.’”
A year and a half later, that idea would have a catchy name — the torpedo bat — and a gaudy introduction into the baseball world. Five Yankees started swinging it this season, and they contributed nine home runs in one weekend, including five in one Saturday matinee against the Brewers in which YES Network broadcaster Michael Kay first called attention to the bats.
The cellphones of bat manufacturers were immediately overwhelmed with calls and texts from players and agents, a barrage starting even before the final pitch of that game. The secret was out.
The best ideas are the ones that seem so simple and intuitive in hindsight, and this was no different: increase the mass, and thus the energy and exit velocity at the primary point of contact. Still, by baseball standards, this was a radical innovation in a staid industry that is 150 years old. Its lesson is waiting to be applied across all sports, challenging assumptions and complacency potentially in favor of careful reinvention of even the most basic tools.
“It makes a lot of sense, but it’s like, why hasn’t anyone thought of it in 100-plus years?” said Yankees outfielder Giancarlo Stanton. “Then you try it, and as long as it’s comfortable in your hands — we’re creatures of habit, so the bat’s got to feel kind of like a glove or an extension of your arm.”
Stanton quietly used a torpedo bat from Marucci while slugging seven postseason homers last fall — and, it turns out, he wasn’t the only one to deliver playoff heroics with such a model. Guardians outfielder Lane Thomas adopted a tapered Old Hickory bat and smashed a grand slam off AL Cy Young winner Tarik Skubal in ALDS Game 5.
In interviews with 16 players, front office executives, batmakers and other insiders, Sports Business Journal traced the path of the torpedo bat’s innovation and identified the keys for its disruption with lessons that apply across all sports. Its creation was a race not just in research and development — a formula involving both physics and biology — but also, crucially, in adoption.
“You’re talking about wood baseball bats, so at the end of the day, we’re at the mercy of Mother Nature with most everything we do,” said Travis Copley, Old Hickory Vice President of Sales and Marketing. “This is a huge innovation already. It potentially could be even bigger.”
The Louisville Slugger Torpedo Bat (top) compared to a traditional bat shows the difference in the ‘wood budget’. Photo: Getty Images
Now, everyone from industry giants to batmaking boutiques are recognizing the need to do more. Hillerich said Louisville Slugger is “looking at doing more and more research,” and so too will Spoke Bats CEO Scott Pershern, whose founding principle is the use of a modeling engine to personalize each bat (i.e. bespoke, hence the name) and continue to push the boundaries of a product market mired in “institutional inertia.”
“The interesting thing for me,” Pershern said, “is now it has opened up everybody’s minds to what is possible.”
To see where baseball bats — and all stagnant sports equipment is going — it’s instructive to first understand how the sport arrived at this critical tipping point.
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As an analyst with the Yankees, Aaron Leanhardt asked the players where on the bat they try to strike the ball. Leanhardt is a career-changer — an MIT-educated physicist who conducted NASA-funded research and was a physics professor at Michigan — who said his eureka moment was seeing that the sweet spot the players targeted was not the fattest part of the bat. He recalled to reporters saying, “Well, let’s flip it around. It’s going to look silly, but are we willing to go with it?”
Elsewhere in the AL East, Baltimore Orioles Assistant General Manager Sig Mejdal fielded questions from hitters wondering about the efficacy of bat fitting — that is, the use of advanced data and technology to ensure players are using the best-performing bat for their swing. Mejdal replied, “Sorry, I have no idea,” but he began investigating. Mejdal also has NASA roots, having worked for the agency as a mathematical modeler after earning multiple engineering and operations degrees.
“My background is mechanical engineering, so if you’re a hammer, everything you see is a nail,” said Mejdal, who led a team working on similar designs, including one called a bubble bat. “When you see the bat, it’s impossible not to wonder and not to think about the engineering of it.”
Also operating on a separate strand of development were the Cubs, whose core hitters last year — Cody Bellinger, Ian Happ, Nico Hoerner and Dansby Swanson — all tried variations at least in batting practice. “We had some long discussions with the Cubs this past summer where we talked about tapered-barrel bats a couple different times,” Pershern noted. (The Cubs did not respond to an interview request.)
An exact accounting isn’t possible, given the cloak-and-dagger secrecy of baseball operations, but Louisville Slugger was working with four unspecified teams on the design. Marucci supports eight MLB clubs through its high-tech baseball performance center, though not all were pursuing this shape. Orioles All-Star catcher Adley Rutschman was seen swinging one last year, as was Mets shortstop Francisco Lindor, who finished second in NL MVP voting.
Marucci CEO Kurt Ainsworth said half of his pro players inquired about the bat earlier this month. Louisville Slugger took more than 100 orders.
Giancarlo Stanton smashed seven postseason home runs last year with a torpedo bat and won ALCS MVP honors. Photo: Getty Images
The Yankees will be remembered for spearheading this because they fostered a culture in which the players bought in despite the unorthodox shape. The bat change may be a revolution, but the closest antecedent is in evolution. The Yankees are Charles Darwin, and everyone else is Alfred Russel Wallace, the naturalist who independently formulated the theory of natural selection but had his contributions overwhelmed by Darwin’s fame.
Most torpedo bats are the product of advanced personalization. Statcast tracking cameras provide a wealth of data on swing speed and path, as well as contact point. The Cubs made Bellinger a custom bat last season, but he didn’t like the way it felt. After an offseason trade, the Yankees made him a new custom bat, which he also didn’t care for. But Bellinger picked up the generic torpedo the Yankees made as a demo for players in 2023 and immediately took to it.
“I swung other bowling pin models, or torpedo bats — I didn’t like them,” Bellinger told SBJ. “This one just feels good in my hands.”
Big leaguers spend decades swinging bats to reach the sport’s highest level, and they take untold batting practice swings before the highly visible performance on the field, so they understandably can be fickle about change. Superstition and word-of-mouth recommendations can go a long way, and the word “feel” is paramount.
Leanhardt talks about a “wood budget,” a certain weight the player can swing, and redistributing wood needs to be done delicately and in balance. Hillerich said these changes are “to maximize the barrel, to maximize the sweet spot and still feel like the exact same bat that they started with.” In some cases, the torpedo bats move enough weight closer to the hands that they can be swung faster, which bears out in early-season Statcast data.
MLB has affirmed that these bats are legal, with the only real geometric stipulation being that the diameter can’t exceed 2.61 inches. Many torpedo bats now have larger barrels than regular bats, and at least some are at that max diameter. (Most torpedo bats are made of birch because it is a lower-density wood than maple; the latter makes it hard to construct a bat that is sturdy enough overall because the handle would have to be tiny to get the weight right.)
The league has a team of inspectors who periodically visit clubhouses to ensure compliance. The leader of that program is Scott Drake, the CEO of wood product inspection firm PFS-TECO, who first saw the torpedo shape in a MLB clubhouse when he saw Stanton’s bat last season. But even that reminded him of a manufacturer’s tour more than a decade ago when he saw maple bats that had “a very similar shape and design”, though those didn’t meet the density for requirements in MLB.
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Within a week of the new bats’ public introduction at Yankee Stadium, the website of just about every bat manufacturer underwent a rapid update. “Incoming Torpedo,” touted Old Hickory. “The bat everyone is talking about is here,” promised Marucci. “Get the TPD1 Torpedo Bat Today,” exclaimed Louisville Slugger.
“I love that people are talking about baseball, and my role here is growing the game of baseball,” Marucci’s Ainsworth said. “This is great for our game, all the way down.”
“All the kids now want it,” said Éric Gagné, the former Cy Young-winning closer who is now primary owner of B45 Baseball. The company’s GM, Marie-Pier Gosselin, said it’s been nimble in meeting demand — “We had the wood available to make them rather quickly” — and continuing a tradition of innovation. The Québec-based company was the first to use birch in bats two decades ago, a short time after Barry Bonds and Sam Bats popularized maple.
Consumer demand was immediate, buoyed in part by the catchy torpedo name that has overtaken bowling pin, bubble and tapered barrel for obvious marketing reasons. Louisville Slugger noted that it is even thinking about new ways to shape the barrel of its metal bats. Without the underlying data informing a personalized bat shape, some experts aren’t convinced amateur players will be able to fully maximize its potential. Similarly, Ainsworth noted, younger hitters are less apt to hit the ball off the sweet spot, so the taper at the end of the bat might actually offset some gains.
Experts are clear that the benefits are real, but moderate, likely an increase of a couple miles per hour in exit velocity when connected on the sweet spot. Every mph of EV usually leads to another 5 feet or so of distance, which can quickly turn warning-track flyouts into first-row home runs. As an added benefit, some predict that the tapered barrel tip might turn poor contact (weak grounders or popups) into foul tips that keep the hitter at the plate.
Even Yankees Manager Aaron Boone said it’s more gains on the margin and helping players incrementally. The Orioles’ Mejdal noted that “this isn’t for every hitter.” Chuck Schupp, a 40-year industry veteran with Louisville Slugger, Marucci and now Chandler Bats, said he fielded 100 inquiries that first weekend, but cautioned everyone, “You’ve still got to hit the ball in the sweet spot — it doesn’t matter what the bat looks like. I just don’t think this is going to be an ‘a-ha’ moment to make a guy a better player.”
But, as Old Hickory’s Copley noted, the torpedo may serve as the catalyst for a broader “ideology of redesigning bats.” Just as the 2003 book “Moneyball” spawned the entire baseball analytics industry by making clubs reconsider all forms of player evaluation — and not just the initial realizations about metrics, such as on-base percentage — so, too, might torpedo bats precipitate deeper reevaluations of bats and other sports equipment.
Lane Thomas hit a huge homer for Cleveland with a torpedo bat. Photo: Getty Images
Wood bats are a relatively small but crowded market, with 41 MLB-approved suppliers. Pro models typically retail to consumers for $100 to $200 apiece. “You have the big-name companies, but aside from them, they’re all pretty boutique companies, so obviously it’s hard to have a very big R&D department,” Gosselin said. R&D dollars are typically slated more for the larger amateur market — and colleges, high schools and Little Leagues all swing metal.
Prior wood bat innovations in the past decade have centered on the knob at the end of the bat. Some players began preferring larger puck-sized knobs. Axe Bats pioneered a new sloped handle design. But the area is rife with opportunity.
“I personally feel like there is a bat that can be designed for each player, and we believe that you shouldn’t be using the same bat versus each pitcher anyway,” Ainsworth said. “In golf, you don’t use the same club for every shot.”
An early Marucci investor, former Phillies star Chase Utley, actually tried this prior to the 2009 World Series, ordering a bat with a different shape and length to face the infamous cutter thrown by Yankees Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera. He grounded into a double play his one chance to use it.
Brewers infield prospect Eric Brown Jr., a former first-round pick now in Class AA, ordered a tapered-barrel bat from Spoke late last summer because it felt lighter — “like a toothpick” — as the long season wound down. Brown had previously suffered a hand injury from getting jammed so often, leading Pershern to move the hard knot of the wood closer to his hands.
“Since the knot is moved down the barrel, I don’t feel that I’m getting jammed,” Brown said. “Essentially, it makes the bat harder.”
The torpedo bat’s shape isn’t as polygonal as Tesla’s Cybertruck, and its future seems brighter, despite Hillerich’s first impression. Whereas the president of an automotive design consultancy recently described the Cybertruck to Forbes as “a huge swing and a huge miss,” the torpedo bat seems poised to be exactly the opposite.
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