Noriega: Torpedo bats and tariffs, good ideas that haven’t been tried?
Apr 2, 2025, 8:00 AM | Updated: 9:51 am
(Canva)
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SALT LAKE CITY —Torpedo bats and tariffs, what do they have in common? Stick with me.
The start of the 2025 baseball season, the Milwaukee Brewers ran into a buzz-saw. Or was it a jigsaw? A circular saw? Nope, they ran into the New York Yankees secret weapon — a lathe and the birth of the “torpedo” bat.
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The New York Yankees hit nine homers in a single game and 15 in the first three. They did it using a controversial, novel and legal bat that looks like an elongated bowling pin — I don’t see the torpedo resemblance, but the baseball world didn’t give me veto power. Was the bat magic only in the hands of Yankees? Nope. After the Yankees set the scoreboard on fire, Cincinnati Reds star Elly De La Cruz decided to try a torpedo bat for the first time in a real game. He went 4-for-5 with two homers and seven RBI.
Major League Baseball has been using the same standardized wood bat since 1870. Until recently everyone agreed that this was the best and only way to produce a bat.
While MLB rules states that bats must be made of one piece of solid wood, with a maximum diameter of 2.61 inches at the thickest part and a maximum length of 42 inches, there are some minor tweaks a player can make to their bat. It can be a little longer or shorter — heavier or lighter, but the shape has remained.
The torpedo bat has a tapered end to the bat. It supposedly moves the sweet-spot to the hitter’s favorite part of the bat.
Nobody, in 155 years, thought that they could improve on the shape of the bat. We just accepted that this was the best way to hit a baseball and made it work because nobody questioned it.
How does this relate to tariffs?
Tariffs might be the economy’s torpedo bat? The thing nobody has tried, but is secretly a great idea?
Just like the torpedo bat, few economists think tariffs are a good idea.
What if tariffs are the answer?
Trump claims that tariffs could raise $600 billion a year in revenue.
We’ve relied on income taxes, corporate taxes, and Social Security/Medicare taxes to fund the government and we’re coming up $1.8 trillion short. Either we make massive increases to income and corporate taxes or we try door number three—tariffs.
“Here’s the struggle, It’s never worked before,” said Zion’s Bank Senior Economist Robert Spendlove. “So we’re putting a lot of confidence into this policy that is totally untested and saying we’re going to roll the dice. Hopefully it works. If it doesn’t, there’s a high degree of downside risk.”
It’s true that massive, widespread tariffs don’t have a recent track record. You have to go back the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 which slapped 40-60% tariffs on imports, in an effort to protect farmers and businesses. Many economists believe the tariffs worsened that economy and contributed to the Great Depression.
But from the 1790-1860, 90% of the U.S. federal government was funded by tariffs.
Whether we agree or disagree with Trump’s take on tariffs, I think we can all agree spending nearly $2 trillion dollars that we don’t have every year is bad.
“They [The Trump administration] calls this Economic Detox. We’ve gotten addicted to cheap stuff from overseas, we’ve gotten addicted to government spending, we’ve gotten addicted to unsustainable levels of debt within our own government, and we’ve got to break ourselves of these addictions,” said Spendlove.
Maybe tariffs are the silver bullet … or in this case the torpedo bat.
