In his playing days, Eric Gagné’s objective was simple.
“My job was to break bats,” the former Dodgers closer, and 2003 Cy Young Award winner, joked with a laugh.
Which makes his current occupation, as the CEO 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,” Gagné said in a phone interview this week. “That was my enemy back in the day.”
Where Gagné was once a hitter’s menace, collecting 161 of his 187 career saves with the Dodgers from 1999-2006, the retired 49-year-old right-hander is now one in the business of helping them hit.
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 hitting creations.
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 of by Leanhardt while working in the Yankees’ front office, the bowling-pin-shaped torpedo model eschews the typical characteristics of traditional bat designs. The fattest part of the barrel is actually 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.
In the early days of this year’s 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 [already], shaped this way, shaped that way,” said veteran Dodgers slugger Max Muncy, one of many MLB 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, Gagné’s company has been manufacturing them ever since Leanhardt first approached Young last spring.
“It looks a little awkward … but it makes total sense,” Gagné 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 maple- and ash-dominated market; using yellow birch lumber harvested in Quebec to design bats that lasted longer and, thanks to the physical characteristics of the wood type, would actually get firmer over time, resulting in fewer breaks and long-lasting barrel strength.
“We were the first company to start [making bats with] yellow birch,” said Olivier Lépine, the company’s longtime production manager. “If we can improve the game a little bit, we’re always willing to do something like that.”
Gagné 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, as he described it, he’s an “ideas guy” within the B45 operation, using his knowledge of getting hitters out over a 10-year MLB career to innovate improvements to what they swing at the plate.
“I always thought the extension of us [players] was our equipment,” Gagné 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 newfangled torpedoes.
“I think guys will try it. I mean, how do you not, right?” Dodgers co-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 among others — immediately captured the attention of the rest of the league.
“You see those kinds of outcomes, of course,” Van Scoyoc added.
Behind the scenes, however, the rise of the torpedo bat has been a long time coming. As far back as last spring, companies like B45 have been putting them into production.
Using measurements and design specifications provided by Leanhardt, B45 crafted the awkwardly shaped barrels with the use of computer-programmed automatic knives. They shipped the bats to their Yankees clients, but were unsure if the idea would catch on in baseball’s mainstream.
“The [initial] feedback was good, but after that, we didn’t hear anything,” Lépine said. “We didn’t know if players would like it or not.”
That’s why, this year, Young brought torpedo samples with him on his spring training tour to showcase to a wider range of players. For many, it was the first they’d heard about the idea — even before the Yankees’ season-opening home run explosion.
“I was one of the first guys going through spring training with torpedo bats,” Young said. “So everywhere I went, people were like, ‘Oh shoot, what is this?’ They had a lot of questions about it.”
Now, Young said, more than 50 of B45’s big-league hitters have placed orders for their own torpedo-bat models.
And while B45 doesn’t have any current Dodgers clientele, several members of the team’s lineup 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 model proves to be. Dodgers personnel have emphasized that a hitter’s technique remains the biggest factor in success at the plate. Lépine 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 become a .300 hitter or something like that.”
Muncy, the first Dodgers player to use a torpedo bat 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 game-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 to suit 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 pitching 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,” said Gagné, now on the other side of the hitter-pitcher dynamic through his work with B45. “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.”