It's Bananas, Until It's Not

Aaron Leanhardt, physicist and baseball player, is currently the field coordinator for the Miami Marlins. Photo: Jeff Roberson / Associated Press

This morning, as I perused the daily email of headlines from the Wall Street Journal, I was intrigued by this one: The MIT Scientist Behind the 'Torpedo Bats' That Are Blowing Up Baseball.

I'm bringing this story here, dear readers of Table Talk, for a few reasons.

The first is that I giggled to myself when I learned in the WSJ article that while Aaron was in grad school at MIT, he also played shortstop in a nearby amateur baseball league. The story I'm telling myself about this is he understood the importance of getting in the reps in multiple dimensions of his well-being at a time in his life where I imagine it would've been really easy to only focus on his school work.

The second is that after earning a PhD and teaching physics, he decided he wanted to break into coaching baseball, which he did in 2017 at Dawson Community College in eastern Montana. He told the head coach he always loved baseball, wanted to coach, and Dawson had an open hitting coach spot. I don't know if Aaron felt like teaching physics was no longer his work to do, but I identify with his desire to spend his time in a different way. I imagine some people in his life didn't get it, just like some people didn't get it when I shifted my work to Thought Kitchen.

The third is that Aaron followed his curiosity about how to "effectively hit a round ball with a wooden bat" while staying within MLB regulations. To figure this out, he iterated with a community of minor-league players in the Yankees farm team system, along with every lathe operator for every bat manufacturer in baseball. The bat they created together, "torpedo bats," look more like long bowling pins than traditional baseball bats. I imagine people thought Aaron and friends were bananas to try this new bat design. Now that the Yankees have tied a MLB record 15 home runs in the first three games of this season, and the story is in mainstream media, lots of MLB players want to get their hands on a torpedo bat, and Aaron has been the focus of at least one media scrum.

While not all of our iterating or shifting careers may turn out like Aaron's, I'm inviting you to pause and consider: often, making any kind of change feels like it's bananas, until it's not.

What change are you hungry for?