Baseball Field Coordinator Invents "Torpedo Bat"

In the early Spring of 2025, the sports world first heard of ‘torpedo’ baseball bats when the New York Yankees hitters used them to tie a record number (15) home runs during their first three games. Soon the background story emerged: the inventor of the newly shaped bats had been a physicist and long-time college professor of physics who had totally changed his career path from science-focused mathematics to sports coaching.

EARLY PERSONAL BACKGROUND

Aaron Leanhardt (AL) was always comfortable learning arithmetic in elementary school and solving math problems during his middle and high school years. He had almost as much fun playing with numbers as playing baseball after school. 

EDUCATION

Following high school graduation, AL studied electrical engineering at the University of Michigan, later earning his Doctorate in physics at M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology). 

As a graduate student in physics, AL was part of a research laboratory team that cooled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded in human history.

Wolfgang Ketterle, Ph.D. in physics, who won the Nobel Prize in physics in 2001, called AL “one of the handful of absolute outstanding students” he has taught in nearly 30 years at M.I.T.

FIRST CAREER – PHYSICIST

AL’s first career path was ‘Physicist.’ 

Science-based definition: 

‘Physicist – A scientist who specializes in physics, which encompasses the interactions of matter and energy at all length and time scales in the physical universe. Physicists generally are interested in the root or ultimate causes of phenomena and usually frame their understanding in mathematic terms. The field generally includes two types of physicists: (1) experimental physicists who specialize in the observation of natural phenomena and the development and analysis of experiments and (2) theoretical physicists who specialize in mathematical modeling of physical systems to rationalize, explain and predict natural phenomena. 

Definition for non-scientists: 

Physicist – A math-focused scientist who tries to understand the basic laws of the universe involving energy, motion and fundamental forces of nature. One way to better understand what physicists do is to review their science-based discoveries and inventions over the past thousand years, including proving that planets and the earth move around the sun, that the speed of light is faster than sound, the principles of geometry, gravity, electromagnetism, radiation and cosmic microwaves. 

Famous events involving principles of physics include:

• Sir Isaac Newton observing an apple falling from a tree, wondering why the apple fell straight down rather than sideways, leading to his theory (now recognized as a ‘scientific law’) that gravity is an invisible force within the earth which affects objects upon and above the earth. The extent of the gravitational ‘pull’ was something Newton tried to understand through experiments and observations. 
• Ben Franklin flying a kite with a key attached, during a lightning storm, to see if the kite would attract electricity. (Editor’s note: whether this happened is still debated by scholars but there is no scientific doubt that if lightning had struck the key, Franklin would have been killed by the electricity surging downward from the key through everything to which the key was connected; whether true or not, the story remains a good example of someone trying to understand and hopefully prove a ‘law of nature.’) 

Inventions based on physicist experiments include electron microscopes, lasers, telescopes and x-rays

The best way to practice physics is by working on physics problems. One of many online examples of experiments which demonstrate typical physics problems: If I walk 20 miles North, then 15 miles East, then 10 miles at 35 degrees South of East, what distance have I traveled? If I travel the entire distance in 4 hours, what is my average velocity? 

Major employers of career physicists are academic institutions, laboratories, military and private industries, both profit and nonprofit. 

Job titles for graduate physicists include Agricultural Scientist, Air Traffic Controller, Biophysicist, Computer Programmer, Electrical Engineer, Environmental Analyst, Geophysicist, Medical Physicist, Meteorologist, Oceanographer, Physics Teacher / Professor, Research Scientist, Reactor Phyicist, Engineering Physicist, Satellite Missions analyst, Science Writer, Stratigrapher, Software Engineer, Systems Engineer, Microelectronics Engineer and Radar Developer. 

Typical duties of physicists with Master’s and Doctoral degrees working in their domain involve research, observation and analysis, data preparation, instrumentation, design and development of industrial and medical equipment, computer and software development. 

FIRST CAREER IS NEVER A BINDING COMMITMENT

What AL’s physicist colleagues didn’t realize was that in the rare moments when he wasn’t toiling away at the lab, AL was moonlighting as a naturally gifted, speedy shortstop in a local amateur baseball league.

Editor: A ‘shortstop’ plays in the middle of the infield, where speed and agility are necessary to anchor the defense. Usually, the team manager assigns the best athlete to this position. 

AL performed well enough as an amateur league hitter in 2001 (batting .464) and as a slick fielder, to be selected to play in an Amateur Baseball All-Star Game at a minor league pro team stadium. 

Years later, AL’s physicist colleagues recalled that AL never spoke about his ‘second life’ on the baseball field. Said an M.I.T. professor colleague, “We didn’t even know about that.” 

In early 2025, the baseball world suddenly learned all about AL’s remarkably different careers – first as a physicist / teacher, ultimately as a professional baseball coach. 

ABANDONING A SUCCESSFUL CAREER TO PURSUE A NEW PATH MAY BE A REASONABLE CAREER RISK

While LA was engaged in interesting physics work with respectful colleagues, he realized that he was growing older but still with time to more fully engage in his life-long passion – play baseball or at least work within the sport, to which he could bring his math problem-solving skills to improve his and possibly others’ sports performance. 

If LA’s ‘Plan B’ (baseball involvement) career didn’t lead to career satisfaction, he could always return to ‘Plan A’ – physicist and professor of physics.

Although AL’s schoolteachers and professors quickly realized his talent to use numbers to set up and solve physics problems, the sports world took longer for AL’s baseball-related analytic talents to be recognized. 

After AL concluded that his talent as a player would never earn a position on a pro baseball Major League team, he shifted his baseball career interest from playing to coaching. Chris Lewis, then head baseball coach at a community college, recalls the first time he encountered AL, whose only baseball experience beyond playing was a summer coaching gig in an independent professional league. AL spoke to Lewis about the open hitting coach role on Lewis’ staff. “His resume looked like some kind of physics project,” Lewis remembered. “I was like Holy Cow, I can’t even read this thing.”

Lewis was curious to know why someone with AL’s education and teaching background wanted to come to Montana. Al told him that he always loved baseball, wanted to break into coaching and was willing to accept low pay and long hours for the opportunity. (Editor: The news article upon which this story is based did not include whether AL was married when he decided to pursue a second career with likely much less earnings. I suspect he was a ‘single’ guy, or his marital partner was well-compensated in business or via inheritance or lottery.)

AL was the hitting coach for the community college for one season before successfully applying for a coaching position with the Yankees, where he started as a minor league, assistant batting coach, eventually working his way up to “Field Coordinator.”

FACTORS IN CONSIDERING A CAREER CHANGE

Whether a worker is happy or unhappy in his or her current career, occasionally the worker begins to consider shifting to another job within that career or to a completely different career. Common reasons for any such shift (not all are applicable to every person):

Focusing on the current job or career:

• Current tasks are boring or its opposite: dangerous
• Co-workers create a difficult work environment
• The company’s work is illegal or immoral
• Work hours are too long
• Commuting to and from work takes too long
• Prospects for advancing to better duties or pay are dim
• Management doesn’t fully appreciate your efforts
• Financial rewards are not worth any or all the negatives

For AL, there were no negatives involving his work as a physicist. So, his career change factors were only related to the potential opportunities within his carefully planned next career. While thinking ahead, AL was comfortable knowing that he could always return to his first career if his Plan B was not successful. 

Focusing on a new job or career:

• Interesting daily tasks which may be useful to others
• Opportunity for an expanded role (e.g. supervising others) 
• Better working conditions including supportive management and respectful co-workers
• Increased compensation

Ironically, AL’s determination to shift careers was so strong that he was willing to “start at the bottom” with only a narrow set of tasks and minimal compensation. 

PRO BASEBALL ‘FIELD COORDINATOR’

When the Yankees hired AL, eventually promoting him from hitting instructor to ‘Field Coordinator,’ AL’s primary duties were to analyze data involving each player’s on-field performance and serve as a link between the Yankees’ analytics team (focusing on details beyond batting average, such as swing speed and exit velocity of batted balls) and its major league coaches. 

AL worked for the Yankees for six years before being lured by another pro baseball franchise – the Miami Marlins – to fill their Field Coordinator position. 

TAKING PROBLEM SOLVING SKILLS FROM ONE CAREER TO ANOTHER

The job description for a Field Coordinator may vary from team to team. In general, tasks range from interacting with coaches for hitting, pitching, bench and bullpen to workload management, run prevention, game planning and communicating with the Major League manager and all coaches. 

While working with people now instead of with complex physics problems, AL had not forgotten how to wonder about problems within his new world of sports (such as improving hitter’s performance), experiment with potential solutions and develop a theory to solve a problem. So, as a hitting coach, AL decided to apply a scientific approach to learn how to most effectively hit a fast-moving, round ball with a wooden bat. 

AL’s solution, which he devised several years after devoting his full-time attention to baseball as a minor-league hitting coordinator, followed a “Eureka Moment” (sudden, exciting discovery) while studying (through slo-motion video) where each player’s bat swing usually contacted the ball. Concluding from the observed data that using the fattest part of the bat produced the most powerful contact, AL decided to prioritize changing the bat dimensions rather than on players’ swing mechanics. The result moved the fat part of the bat closer to the handle rather than leaving the fattest part of the bat at its end, but instead redistributing the weight to the area where the players most often contact the ball. 

By shifting the weight of the bat – but keeping the bat’s weight the same and within the overall dimensions approved by Major League Baseball – contact between bat and ball which occurred at the batter’s usual contact point – would be more forceful. 

The resulting bat dimensions – moving the fattest part to the hitter’s usual contact point – changed the bat’s profile from a bulbous bowling pin to a more even barrel, called a ‘torpedo’ for its resemblance to those underwater weapons launched from military submarines. 

“It’s just about making the bat as heavy and fat as possible in the area where you’re trying to do damage on the baseball,” AL has said. 

The next step to move AL’s idea from the drawing board to batters’ success was to persuade everyone who operates a wood lathe for every bat manufacturer to take seriously the need to precisely comply with the new design. 

The final step toward proving the torpedo bat able to create more forcefully hit baseballs was to generate acceptance from players. Initially the players’ buy-in was slow. But after the Yankees’ home-run barrage on the opening weekend of the 2025 season, that is no longer an issue.

Editor: Note that AL’s job duties as a pro baseball field coordinator gave him the freedom to creatively study how to improve players’ performance. He used research, observation and analysis plus data prep, instrumentation (video to demonstrate where each player’s bat usually struck the pitched ball) to create a science-based result – provable by others – rather than just trying to subjectively motivate batters to avoid swinging at pitches outside the strike zone and then try to direct their swing to where the ball was thrown. 

CAREER SATISFACTION

To master and apply all the complex principles of advanced math to solve physics problems while earning great respect from your co-workers is to achieve career satisfaction beyond any financial earnings. 

Then to follow your passion and bring your first career’s skills to a completely different, second career to promote successful solutions within that new world while again earning respect from co-workers (players and coaches) is to achieve a double dose of career satisfaction.

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This career story is based on a news article written by Jaren Diamond (no baseball ‘diamond’ pun intended), published by The Wall Street Journal April 1, 2025 (not an April Fools joke!) plus online research including Wikipedia.