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CUA Alumn Revolutionizes Baseball
When Aaron Leanhardt was a graduate student in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he was part of a research team that cooled sodium gas to the lowest temperature ever recorded in human history.
What his colleagues didn’t realize was that in the rare moments when Leanhardt wasn’t toiling away at the lab, he was moonlighting as a speedy shortstop in a local amateur baseball league. Leanhardt was good enough to play in a 2001 All-Star Game at a minor-league stadium in Lowell. He hit .464 that season.
“We didn’t even know about that,” said David Pritchard, a professor emeritus at MIT.
More than two decades later, the baseball world suddenly knows all about the 48-year-old Leanhardt. He’s the inventor of the so-called “torpedo bat,” perhaps the most significant development in bat technology in decades.