THE CORK IS ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Sosa's Corked Bat (Ivars Peterson, Science News)

On June 3, 2003, in the first inning of a baseball game between the Chicago Cubs and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, slugger Sammy Sosa hit a ground ball toward second base. The impact split Sosa's bat. The Devil Rays catcher picked up one of the fragments and tossed it over to the home plate umpire, who found a cylindrical piece of cork embedded in the wood.

Sosa was thrown out of the game for using a corked bat and was subsequently suspended for seven games as a punishment.

The rules of Major League Baseball specify that any player who "uses or attempts to use a bat that, in the umpire's judgment, has been altered or tampered with in such a way to improve the distance factor or cause an unusual reaction on the baseball" be called out and ejected from the game. This includes bats that are "filled, flat-surfaced, nailed, hollowed, grooved."

How does a corked bat help a hitter? Drilling out the center of a wooden bat and replacing the wood with cork reduces the bat's weight and changes its center of mass, shifting it toward the bat's handle. Such changes suggest that the bat could become easier to swing and that it could be swung faster. Presumably, hitters could send a ball farther by using a corked bat.

Sosa himself, now with the Baltimore Orioles, admitted that he sometimes used a corked bat in practice just to put on a show for any admiring fans who might be present. He denied ever using such a bat in a game—except by accident on this one occasion.

In fact, tests on 76 bats that belonged to Sosa and were seized by officials after the incident, revealed no evidence of tampering.

Is there any evidence in Sosa's hitting statistics that might reveal that he had been using a corked bat?

The book mentioned, The Physics of Baseball by Robert K. Adair, is fabulous.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 14, 2005 12:00 AM