Max Muncy’s relationship with the ballyhooed torpedo bat may have been a fleeting one. The Los Angeles Dodgers third baseman used the oddly shaped baseball innovation for his first three plate appearances of L.A.’s eventual comeback win over the Atlanta Braves on Wednesday night (LAD 6 ATL 5). Muncy tried out the torpedo bat in part because of his early season struggles. It did not help, as Muncy went 0 for 3 with a strikeout in those three PAs (and a pair of errors in the field).
Muncy, though, would have an opportunity for redemption, albeit without the torpedo bat. The Dodgers clawed back from an early 5-0 deficit and, when Muncy came up again in the eighth, he did so with the potential tying runs on base. This time, though, Muncy torpedoed the torpedo bat. Using instead the more familiar, pre-torpedo implement, Muncy did this at the expense of Atlanta closer Raisel Iglesias:
That’s a clutch two-bagger by Muncy, and that’s a tie game – one that would set the Dodgers up to win the game on Shohei Ohtani’s walk-off home run in the bottom of the ninth.
Ballplayers are fond of whisking causation and correlation into an indiscernible mixture, and even though the torpedo bat may have had nothing to do with Muncy’s pre-eighth inning struggles, there’s power – doubles power, actually – in a final impression. “I do think there was some good to using the torpedo bat, just in BP and everything,” Muncy told reporters after the game. “It might be something that I use as a practice bat and then go back to my bat for the game. It seemed to work that last at-bat.”
For those somehow unfamiliar with the new style of bat that’s seized the baseball zeitgeist by the lapels in recent days, here’s a brief explanation of it from R.J. Anderson’s piece on the perhaps uncertain future of the torpedo bat:
“The torpedo bat is the brainchild of a pioneering New York Yankees front-office staffer turned Miami Marlins coach, Aaron Leanhardt. His vision was to distribute the bat’s mass across areas where some players make contact more frequently, thereby optimizing their offensive output in a way that normal bats did not. To paraphrase former big-league infielder Kevin Smith, the intent is to improve a player’s chances of barreling the ball and reduce the likelihood of whiffing.”
Regardless of what kind of bat he’s using, Muncy’s Dodgers are now 8-0, which gives them the best ever start to a season by a defending World Series champion.
Read the full article here
