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In his playing days, Eric Gagne’s objective was simple.
“My job was to break bats,” the former Dodgers closer joked with a laugh.
Which makes his current occupation, as chief executive of Quebec-based bat company B45, a little more than ironic.
“Now my job is to make sure the bats don’t break anymore, make sure the ball goes farther,” Gagne said in a phone interview this week. “That was my enemy back in the day.”
Where Gagne was once a menace to hitters, collecting 161 of his 187 career saves with the Dodgers from 1999 to 2006 and winning the National League Cy Young Award in 2003, the retired 49-year-old right-hander is now in the business of helping them hit.
Freddie Freeman, who hasn’t played since slipping in the shower on his surgically repaired ankle, is placed on the 10-day injured list by the Dodgers.
Ten years ago he helped front an ownership group that bought B45, long among the more innovative manufacturers in the world of bat-making. And a little more than a year ago, it put him on the cutting edge of the sport’s newest sensation.
Last spring B45’s pro sales rep, Kevin Young, was making an annual tour of Major League Baseball’s spring training complexes to visit clients. During his stop at New York Yankees camp, Young was approached by team analyst Aaron Leanhardt, a former MIT-educated physics professor who had come up with a distinctly original idea.
“He was like, ‘Hey, do you guys do this?’” Young recalled.
In Leanhardt’s hand was an early prototype of the so-called “torpedo” bat.
Originally conceived by Leanhardt while working in the Yankees’ front office, the bowling-pin-shaped torpedo model eschews the characteristics of traditional bat designs. The fattest part of the barrel is closer to the handle, with the idea of redistributing more mass to an area where some hitters make more frequent contact. The rest of the lumber is rounded into a more tapered shape at the end.
This season torpedo bats have become all the rage for big-league hitters. They burst into the public consciousness after a torpedo-heavy Yankees lineup mashed 15 home runs in their season-opening series. And now they are showing up in almost every big-league clubhouse.
“They had 100 different bat models, shaped this way, shaped that way,” said Dodgers slugger Max Muncy, one of many hitters who placed an order for his own torpedo bat this week. “But nothing’s ever been as drastic as what this is.”
In the baseball world, however, such innovations require the help of equipment companies to gain a foothold. And while torpedo bats might just now be making their first public splash, Gagne’s company has been manufacturing them since Leanhardt first approached Young last spring.
“It looks a little awkward … but it makes total sense,” Gagne said. “When you do make contact in the sweet spot, you want the best results. And when you’re hitting two circular things together at 100 mph, you want to make sure that impact zone is greater.”
B45 is no stranger to cutting-edge bat design.
Two decades ago the Canadian company was the first to bring birch-made bats to what was then a market dominated by maple and ash, using yellow birch lumber harvested in Quebec to design bats that lasted longer and, thanks to the physical characteristics of the wood type, actually would get firmer over time, resulting in fewer breaks and long-lasting barrel strength.
“We were the first company to start yellow birch,” said Olivier Lepine, the company’s longtime production manager. “If we can improve the game a little bit, we’re always willing to do something like that.”
Gagne entered the picture in 2015, joining a group of investors to buy the company as he looked for opportunities to remain involved with baseball in his post-playing career. Now he’s an “ideas guy” within the operation, using his knowledge of getting hitters out over a 10-year MLB career to innovate improvements to what they swing at the plate.
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“I always thought the extension of us was our equipment,” Gagne said. “I wasn’t really interested in the business side of it. I was just more interested as a player in: What fits right? What’s cool? What’s not cool?”
And right now, nothing is cooler than the torpedoes.
“I think guys will try it. I mean, how do you not, right?” Dodgers hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc said, noting how the offensive outburst from the Yankees — whose list of torpedo-bat hitters includes Giancarlo Stanton, Jazz Chisholm and Cody Bellinger — immediately captured the attention of the league.
“You see those kinds of outcomes, of course,” Van Scoyoc added.
Behind the scenes, the rise of the torpedo bat has been a long time coming. Using measurements and design specifications provided by Leanhardt, B45 crafted the awkwardly shaped barrels with the use of computer-programmed automatic knives. The company shipped the bats to its Yankees clients but was unsure whether they would catch on.
“The feedback was good, but after that, we didn’t hear anything,” Lepine said. “We didn’t know if players would like it or not.”
That’s why this year Young brought torpedo bats on his spring training tour to showcase to a wider range of players.
“Everywhere I went, people were like, ‘Oh shoot, what is this?’ They had a lot of questions about it,” Young said.
The Dodgers did a lot wrong and dug a big hole against the Braves, but Shohei Ohtani’s walk-off home run helped extend the team’s perfect start.
According to Young, more than 50 of B45’s big-league hitters have placed orders for torpedo bats. And while B45 doesn’t have any Dodgers clients, several members of the team have received torpedo shipments from their personal manufacturers.
“We’re gonna learn about it and study it,” Van Scoyoc said. “All the players want hits, so they’re gonna do anything they can to get a hit.”
It still remains to be seen just how game-changing the torpedo bat proves to be. Dodgers personnel have emphasized that a hitter’s technique remains the biggest factor in success at the plate. Lepine echoed those sentiments, noting that, “I doubt that a 25-home-run guy is gonna become a 40-home-run guy because of the bat, or if a .225 hitter will be become a .300 hitter.”
Muncy, the first Dodger to use a torpedo during Wednesday’s game against the Atlanta Braves, needed only three at-bats to learn the new design wasn’t for him, switching back to his standard model before hitting a tying double in the eighth inning.
“I felt like the bat was causing me to be a little bit off-plane, a little bit in and out of the zone,” said Muncy, who noted he usually hits the ball closer to the end of the barrel and might have been thrown off by the torpedo bat’s different weight distribution. “This is something that takes the weight out of the end of the bat, so maybe it’s just not for me.”
But as long as some players find the torpedo bat suits their swing, companies like B45 will continue to make them — hopeful the sport has found at least one innovative breakthrough to help hitters counter-balance the sport’s significant recent advancements in pitching development, with increases in velocity and movement on breaking balls putting a drag on offense in the modern game.
“The technology, the data has been really a huge advantage for pitchers, for sure,” Gagne said. “So we’re trying to create the bat that makes [hitters] feel good at the plate, that they can trust. It’s really an extension of their own body. So we’re trying to make it where they’re comfortable with it.”
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