PHILADELPHIA — Take one day where the Yankees go crazy hitting home runs and know that a revolution has apparently begun. Three home runs on the first three pitches of a game … nine home runs in one game … an MLB record-tying total of 15 over their first three games of the season, all part of the Yankees’ pummeling series sweep of the Milwaukee Brewers to open the season. But the real news coming out of that series, which calculated out to a 36-14 run differential in favor of the resurrected Bronx Bombers (remember that name?), was the main weapon they used. And no, we’re not talking about the Brewers’ battered pitching staff, which had seven hurlers on the injured list after three games. The bulk of the Yankees’ home runs came with them using the new “torpedo” bats, less popularly known as “bowling pin” bats, the specially diagnosed hitting tool that’s now all the rage, because the Yankees had such a successful start to the season. Nine of the 15 homers were hit with torpedo bats, mostly courtesy of Jazz Chisholm Jr. (three) and Anthony Volpe (two). These bats are mostly credited to the brain work of Aaron Leanhardt, who came up with the idea nearly two years ago of moving the barrel of the bat closer to the middle rather than toward the end, then trimming the mass at the top of the bat, thereby increasing a bat’s sweet spot while keeping the wood mass (and mandated league weight specifications) intact. The bat is tapered at the top, like a bowling pin. Leanhardt is reportedly an MIT-educated physics professor, so naturally in the age of analytics he was working for the Yankees as a minor league hitting coordinator then. He’s now working as a field coordinator for the Miami Marlins, a team that could use all the hitting science it can get. The torpedo is being manufactured by at least several bat manufacturers across the country, including by Victus Sports in King of Prussia, since 2017 a subsidiary of Marucci Sports headquartered near Baton Rouge, Louisiana. That’s where Bryson Stott went to visit the torpedo bat “lab” with the possibility of outfitting a few bats for him. But just because the Yankees had an eye opening weekend, is this newly shaped hitting tool going to be the latest rage? “No, they’ve been around, it’s not a new thing,” Stott said Monday before the Phillies rallied to a 6-1 home opener victory over the Colorado Rockies. “It’s not a thing you can just go and order. … They connect all these wires to you (at the “lab”), and you swing a thousand bats and they kind of tell you where you’re hitting the ball mostly and things like that. “If you’re a guy who uses the whole bat; if you get jammed and hit it on the end and hit the barrel, it’s not for you. You’re taking wood off the end of the bat and shrinking that part. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into it.” Stott indicated he’s farther along in the Phillies’ possible looks into using the torpedo because he’s been to Marucci, explaining he has reletives on his mother’s side that live in Louisiana. But he doesn’t seem to be ready to make the switch just yet. “With the torpedo you can get jammed more than hitting off the end, but then it helps, obviously, because you’re moving the barrel down a little bit,” he said. “But it’s not one of those things where you can call and say, ‘I want this torpedo,’ because it might not work for you. It’s mostly where you hit it and all their computers are telling them where you’re hitting it. “You can see the torpedo being used, now that there were a hundred homers hit by the Yankees (in the opening series). But it’s a legal bat. If you get jammed a lot, why not use it?” • • • Rob Thomson kept Trea Turner from starting again, but said before the game that he was still a possibility for playing. “He’s going to hit and throw and hit in the cages, so we’ll see if his game is progressing. If we don’t use him today then that’s two full days (of rest).” As it turned out, Turner came on in the seventh inning to pinch-hit after Stott floated a two-out double to right field. Turner walked. Then Edmundo Sosa, who started in Turner’s place at shortstop, doubled to right-center to give the Phils the lead. Then Kyle Schwarber crushed a ball high off the batter’s eye wall of ivy in center field and the Phillies never looked back. That moved Thomson to use one of his favorite talking points. “They fight,” he said of his Phils. “Even yesterday (a 5-1 loss), we had the bases loaded and no outs in the ninth inning. I trust them. They’re always fighting, they’re always battling, they’re always competing.” • • • The Phillies could have used real torpedos Monday early on, as they kept hitting balls into Rockies gloves at the wrong times over the first 6.2 innings. But the sellout crowd for the home opener wasn’t going to be quiet just because the hitters were getting frustrated. “You go to some other parks and see 4,000 or 5,000 people, and it’s, I don’t want to say they’re going through the motions, because it’s a major league baseball game, but there’s just no atmosphere,” Stott said. “Each time we get to go out there and play in front of a sold out crowd, it’s awesome. And nobody takes it for granted.”   ...read more read less