An early 2025 MLB season storyline has been the discovery of torpedo bats, as fans, players and coaches encountered a familiar object become strange.

While it remains to be seen if moving more wood into the label to increase a bat’s sweet spot will be most big-league hitters’ preference in the future, we do know this is an inflection point for hitting.

For the past decade, pitchers have disproportionately benefited from the influx of technology, as Edgertronic high-speed cameras provided tools to design pitches with movement to miss barrels and leveraged biomechanics data to pinpoint optimal stride length, lead leg block and maximum external rotation to throw harder. Now, the pendulum is swinging back as hitters take advantage of modern tools, beginning with optimizing the piece of wood they hold in their hands.

Most MLB players use bats that are 33 to 34 inches long and weigh between 30 and 33 ounces from several major vendors. Despite the unique logos on the final products, the inputs of the bats are nearly identical as most vendors use wood from the same forest and supplier, and a single person travels the country servicing all the machines.

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However, despite the seeming uniformity, not all bats are created equal. Two Marucci maple bats that are both 34 inches long and weigh 32 ounces could play differently because of differences in barrel mass. Even if the bats have the same turning model and are produced on the same day for the same hitter, the wood itself varies enough to have a significant effect on batted ball outcomes.

The impact of this variance for a hitter could be lower or higher bat speed, contact rate and exit velocity — three key metrics in today’s game. To measure potential variance, former professional baseball player and bat engineer Keenan Long created LongBall Labs, which works with big league hitters and teams to ensure they are consistently selecting the right individual bats throughout the season.

“Our first approach is to make sure the hitter is getting a consistent bat,” Long recently told Marquee Sports Network. “With shipments having as much as 1.5-ounce differences in barrel mass, that has been shown to significantly affect swing speed (4 to 5 mph), which could very well prevent a hitter from timing up a fastball in the first place.”

The benefit of using a bat that increases a player’s bat speed and exit velocity (and ramifications if it declines) are significant, as for every 1 mph of bat speed you add, you gain 1.2 mph of exit velocity. For every 1.2-mph increase in exit velocity (given the ball is hit with a launch angle between 10 and 40 degrees), the ball goes seven further.

Therefore, if Nico Hoerner’s 2025 average bat speed is 68.1 mph and he believes he is using a bat that will allow him to hit that mark — but because of inevitable variance in manufacturing, one bat plays with a bat speed of 65.7 mph — he is losing 14 feet off fly balls, which means a potential home run becomes a warning-track flyout.

Teams can take two routes with these variance studies — the first being optimization, like being fitted for custom golf clubs, and the second is ensuring consistency so whenever Hoerner picks up a bat, he knows it will play the same way.

“Once the hitter gets dialed into the advanced bat metrics, then we use a combination of performance data and the player’s own experience to identify the optimal bat parameters,” Long said. “At that point, LongBall Labs goes to the bat company to share the information, resulting in the next shipment of bats being finely tuned to meet the hitters’ optimal parameters.”

Any bat design has trade-offs, and the key is individualizing the model, weight and length based on the batted ball data and a given hitter’s swing path.

“It is amazing to see how the players can dial in to this new data once they have access to it,” Long said. “We typically see the player begin to differentiate between what he previously viewed as ‘identical bats’ and accurately predict how his batted ball outcomes will be affected.”

In an industry that continually prioritizes customization, these types of tailored assessments have immediately impacted players and provided competitive advantages that we’ll continue to see on the field.