The most famous (in his day) innovator was Heinie Groh, who swung a bat that had a thin handle but bulged out dramatically at the barrel.

The big buzz of the first week of the baseball season is the “torpedo bat,” a novel shape for a bat that bulges outward at the barrel and tapers at the end. The theory is that bats involve a trade-off: lighter bats generate more bat speed, but wider ones have more surface to make solid contact. Bat shapes and their underlying philosophies have shifted a good deal over time, since 1884, when three-time batting champ and onetime .400 hitter Pete Browning of Louisville commissioned the original “Louisville Slugger” bats from Hillerich and Bradsby. At the time, some hitters even used cricket-style flat bats. Before 1920, more than a few old-timey singles hitters used bats that were nearly as thick at the handle as at the barrel, the better to control the bat with hands held apart when bunting or just slapping at the ball (and also to save expense on broken bats). Joe Sewell, the Hall of Fame infielder known as the game’s toughest strikeout, used the same bat for his entire career. Babe Ruth, by contrast, used one of the game’s heaviest bats, which did nothing to restrain the immense power of his swing. In the 1990s, players such as Barry Bonds started using whip-handled bats that were lighter and broke more easily.

The torpedo bat is all the rage right now because a couple of Yankees are using it and have recently helped the team launch 15 home runs in three games. (Granted, four of those are by Aaron Judge, who isn’t using the bat and doesn’t need the help.) It isn’t unfair to try out new, legal equipment — nor would it be unfair for the league to ban it if it proves destabilizing. You play with every legal advantage you can manage, but some things (like aluminum bats) are quite reasonably illegal in the hands of big leaguers.

Anyway, the torpedo bat is not as new an idea as it may seem. The most famous (in his day) innovator, never really imitated since, was Heinie Groh, who swung what was known as a “bottle bat.” Groh, like many experimenters, did so out of necessity, when he was struggling to break the lineup for John McGraw’s pennant-winning Giants in 1912. The bat had a thin handle but bulged out dramatically at the barrel; like today’s torpedo bats, it resembled a wiffle ball fat bat, but it didn’t taper at the end like the torpedo bat. As Groh’s bio at the Society for American Baseball Research notes, alongside a photo of Groh with the bat:

McGraw suggested that the diminutive infielder might become a better hitter if he used a bat with a bigger barrel. The problem was that Groh’s hands were too small to grip such a bat, so he asked Spalding Sporting Goods to customize a bat for him. Most bats were gradually tapered from the barrel to the handle, but the bat Spalding created for Heinie had an unusually thick barrel and an unusually thin handle, with an abrupt taper in between. As Groh told [Larry Ritter in The Glory of Their Times], “We whittled down the handle of a standard bat, and then we built up the barrel, and when we were finished it looked like a crazy sort of milk bottle.” Thus was born the bottle bat, an innovation that will forever be associated with Heinie Groh.

“What I wanted was a bat with a big butt end but with a skinny handle, so I could get a good grip and swing it,” Groh told Ritter in that 1966 book. At around 5′7″ and 160 lbs, Groh was not a big man, but he needed a strong grip to hit with the bottle bat. It was, he explained,

real wide at one end and then suddenly tapering real quick to a thin handle. The handle part had to be longer than on most bats, because I choked up quite a bit and kept my hands a little apart, too. But I wanted it big starting right above my hands, so if I hit an inside pitch near my hands it would have some power. That bat weighed about 46 ounces, and all the weight was in the barrel, where it counted. You couldn’t hold that bottle bat down at the knob end, ’cause the way the weight was distributed the ball would knock it right out of your hands. But I always choked up and chopped at the ball. I didn’t swing it from the heels. I’d chop at the ball and drive it over the infield, see.

That’s a heavy bat, and the torpedo’s design solves some of the weight issue. McGraw traded Groh in the midst of the 1913 season (when the Giants won their third straight pennant), but along with Hall of Famer Edd Roush, Groh was one of the stars of the 1919 Reds, who won the Black Sox–tainted World Series. McGraw got him back to play for the Giants when they won the World Series in 1922 and pennants in 1923 and 1924, and he was a bench player for the Pirates when they lost to the Yankees in the World Series in 1927. He also played in the famous 1917 game where both pitchers carried a no-hitter after nine innings. His absence, because of an injury, put the teenaged Fred Lindstrom, then just 18, at third base when a fateful bad hop over Lindstrom’s head gave the Washington Senators the victory in Game Seven of the 1924 Series. As Groh told Ritter, “There was a period of about 15 years there, where it seemed like if anything real big happened I was right on the spot.” He batted .474 in the 1922 Series and had 474 as his license plate number for the rest of his life.

Groh wasn’t a big home run hitter, with only 26 in his career, but you’d be hard-pressed to argue with his success with the bottle bat. From 1915 to 1921, he batted .301/.380/.400, leading the league once or twice each in runs, hits, doubles, on base percentage, walks, and on base plus slugging. By the modern Wins Above Replacement (WAR) metric, he was worth 6.4 WAR per 162 games from 1915 to 1919, a serious star-level performance. After a 16-year big-league career, he did what many big leaguers of his day did and played seven more seasons in the minors, where he batted over .300 six years in a row, retiring at age 42. Until now, however, his was a basepath not traveled by his successors.