Posted 10:09 AM by Sean
King Kaufman serves as the voice of sanity regarding Sammy Sosa's corked bat in Salon.com today. Aside from discussing the fact that corking your bat doesn't really help much, if at all (which isn't the point, but is interesting anyway), Kaufman wonders why we consider pitchers who doctor the ball "colorful," but hitters who doctor the bat "cheaters." This point was also made last night by Peter Gammons on Baseball Tonight, and yesterday on ESPN.com by Rob Neyer (who, like Kaufman, quoted Robert Adair - the author of The Physics of Baseball - about the properties of corked bats).

Kaufman, Gammons, and Neyer have a point - and maybe more of a point than they realize. Pitchers who doctor the ball are essentially interfering with the entire process of pitching. Once you've scuffed or spat on or otherwise altered the ball to sharpen its break, even a mediocre delivery will do. But hitters who alter the bat still have to select pitches and make pretty decent contact before that alteration really comes into play. True, replacing wood with cork will make the bat slightly lighter - like 0.1% lighter - and thus fractionally improve bat speed, and true, in baseball even the tiny advantages matter, but that's still no guarantee of success.

Yesterday, MLB X-rayed 76 of Sosa's bats, and found none containing cork or other illegal substances. It looks likely that they'll also X-ray at least some of the bats he used during the 1998 season, when he and Mark McGwire were engaged in the home-run record chase. Assuming that those bats come up clean, I think that all but the most conspiracy-minded of us could conclude that either Sammy is telling the truth about the bat being for batting practice only, or that his adventures in lumber modification began very recently. During the course of the investigation, MLB is expected to review film of Sosa in action; I think perhaps an equally telling experiment would be to review film of his taking batting practice, and to ask how long he's been using a corked bat for BP. It would be very suspicious indeed if they were unable to find proof that Sosa had previously used a modified bat for the reason he says he did.