The newest innovation in baseball, the bat has a seemingly inflated barrel that is thickest and heaviest where the player most frequently makes contact.

In the late 1990s, an Ottawa man changed bat technology with the creation of maple bats. Soon, almost every major leaguer wanted one.

I’m just playing baseball.” That the Yankees had a historically great game, and that some players were using funny-looking bats, “is more coincidence than destiny or science,” Smith told me. After all,