Aaron Leanhardt, started by reaching out to New York Yankees players for consultation in the early 2023 season. He implied that last year’s league-wide batting average was the lowest in more than half a century. Therefore, for his minor league programming, he put forward a crucial question for the spring season: During this time of remarkable pitching, how can hitters improve their offensive output?
“Players were feeling the pressure from the remarkable quality of pitching,” Leanhardt noted. Leanhardt spent seven years as a physics professor at the University of Michigan before switching fields to sports with the goal of dealing with these types of challenges. The more he listened to players talk, he felt it might begin to take some form for him. Of course, that was with strikeouts hitting record levels, and hitters wanted to get better at making contact.
Leanhardt thought that one very probably sound way to do that would be to increase the size of the barrels of their bats. Making the barrel fatter part of the bat that makes the greatest impact appeared really terrific in theory, but it posed practical problems. The larger the barrel, the more weight would be added to the bat, which would lower bat speed and thus balance all benefits of a larger sweet spot.
Aaron Leanhardt rethought the problem once again from a completely different angle. He proposed to the players that every bat has, in the way of a ‘wood budget,’ a given amount of weight always between 31 and 32 ounces-to be spent over a certain length. The issue was finding a way to devote more of that weight to the barrel without messing up the rest of the bat.
This inquiry led to what could be the most significant advancement in bat technology for decades, comparable to the transformation from ash to maple bats.
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