By Oliver Thomas, Staff Writer

If you follow baseball, your whole social media feed is likely flooded with discourse surrounding the biggest storyline of the year so far as the topic of torpedo bats has taken the baseball world by storm.

Torpedo bats are different from the standard bat that most players use. They require part of the barrel to be closer to the handle than current bats. This style has picked up steam quickly, as some suggest that it helps give the “sweet spot” of the bat more power by making it bigger while also allowing players to increase their bat swing speed.

After Yankees players Jazz Chisolm Jr., Austin Wells, Cody Bellinger and Anthony Volpe all began using the new bat, the baseball world caught fire. The Yankees hit 15 home runs in their opening series against the Brewers, starting a massive controversy among the baseball community.

This included a record-setting nine home runs in their second game of the series, which had not been done since the turn of the century. With an offensive explosion all over national headlines, fans were eager to reach unreasonable conclusions, saying that torpedo bats were going to ruin the sport and that the Yankees were cheating.

All of this is so far from the truth. Nothing about the torpedo bat is illegal. MLB states that the diameter of the bat cannot be thicker than 2.61 inches in diameter, and anything less than that is legal. With the torpedo bat’s diameter and length below the legal limit, there is nothing illegal about them.

Fans have also failed to realize that this is not a brand-new invention that the Yankees are first to. Other players like Francisco Lindor and Ryan Jeffers have also started the season using a similar model bat. The fact of the matter is that this whole story was overblown just because it involved America’s most hated team, the New York Yankees.

Jeffers and Lindor are both off to a slow start, as Jeffers is yet to record a single extra-base hit and is posting a .522 OPS, while Lindor is holding a .160 batting average through his first 20 plate appearances.

“This isn’t some PED type of thing. It’s just a different shaped bat,” former MLB second baseman Trevor Plouffe said. “People have been using this bat since last year and we never heard a peep.”

This is not to say that the torpedo bats are not a significant advancement. For some players, especially those who tend to make contact lower on the barrel, it can be extremely useful. However, the Yankees opening series was not only the result of the torpedo bat. It was one of the league’s best offenses having a great performance against a team missing almost their entire starting pitching rotation due to injury.

This entire situation has been blown far out of proportion by both fans and media. The torpedo bat is just another advancement in baseball. In a time when teams have more access to scientific data and advanced analytics, this is just another advancement in baseball. Rather than calling the torpedo bats “a form of cheating” and making other unreasonable claims, fans need to understand this is just part of the sport.

The torpedo bat is nothing but a small part of the new science and analytics-based era that baseball has entered.