The buzz about 'torpedo' bats starts in Pennsylvania factory

A 70-year-old man who plays in an area senior hardball league popped into Victus Sports this week because he needed bats for the new season. Plus he just had to take some cuts with baseball’s latest fad and see for himself if there really was some wizardry in the wallop of a torpedo bat.

Ed Costantini, of Newtown Square, picked up the custom-designed VOLPE11-TPD Pro Reserve Maple, and took his hacks just like MLB stars and Victus customers Anthony Volpe or Bryson Stott would inside the company’s batting cage.

Costantini had a similar process and thought the hype surrounding the torpedo since it exploded into the baseball consciousness over the weekend was a “hoax.” But after dozens of swings in the cage, where he said the balance was better, the ball sounded more crisp off the bat, the left-handed hitter ordered on the spot four custom-crafted torpedo bats at $150 a pop.

“The litmus test that I used was, I could see where the marks of the ball were,” Costantini said. “The swings were hitting the thickness of the torpedo as opposed to the end of the bat.”

More than just All-Stars want a crack at the torpedo — a striking design in which wood is moved lower down the barrel after the label and shapes the end a little like a bowling pin — and Costantini’s purchase highlighted the surge of interest in baseball’s shiny new toy outside the majors.

That was, of course, until Paul Goldschmidt and Cody Bellinger hit back-to-back homers for the New York Yankees last Saturday to open a nine-homer barrage. Victus Sports, known as much for their vibrant bats painted as pencils or the Phillie Phanatic dressed as a King’s Guard, had three employees at the game and they started a text thread where they hinted to those back home that, perhaps more than home runs were taking off.

Business was about to boom, too.

Yankees crowed about the torpedo-shape concept that had baseball buzzing -- and pitchers grumbling. The scuttlebutt and headlines stoked their super curious peers, most with an eye out for any legal, offensive edge, into asking Victus and other bat manufacturers about the possibility of taking a swing with the most famous style of bat since Roy Hobbs grabbed a “Wonderboy.”

Victus spent most of the last 14 years trying to help shape the future of baseball. The company’s founders just never imagined that shape would resemble a bowling pin.

“It was the most talked about thing about bats that we ever experienced,” Victus co-founder Jared Smith said.

Victus isn’t the only company producing the bulgy bats, but they were among the first to list them for sale online after the Yankees’ made them the talk of the sports world. The torpedo bat took the league by storm in only 24 hours, and days later, the calls and orders, and test drives -- from big leaguers to rec leaguers -- are humming inside the company’s base, in a northwest suburb of Philadelphia.

Victus was stamped this season as the official bat of Major League Baseball and business was already good: Phillies slugger Bryce Harper is among the stars who stick their bats on highlight reels.

Here’s the surprising part of the torpedo bat: For all its early hype, the bat is no rookie in the game.

The lethal lumber has been used by some sluggers in baseball for at least a year or two only, well, no one really noticed. Giancarlo Stanton and Francisco Lindor used torpedoes last season. Other players experimented with it and no one — not the bulk of other players or journalists or fans — ever really picked up on the newfangled advance in hitting innovation.

Smith said only “a few baseball junkies” inquired about the bats.

Before last weekend, Victus had no plans to mass produce the bat, making it only available to professionals.

Now, Smith said, “I think it’s our job to kind of educate the public in what’s out there.”

The odd shape off the bat — like making a sausage, the meat is simply pushed down the casing — has little to no effect at Victus on the dynamics of making a baseball bat. The cost is the same as a standard bat, too, with a sticker price starting at around $200.



(AP Photo/Matt Rourke)