All clean

Hall of Fame X-rays five Sosa bats, finds nothing

An X-ray of the bat Sammy Sosa used to hit his 500th homer showed no funny business. AP

NEW YORK (AP) -- All five of Sammy Sosa's bats belonging to the Hall of Fame showed no signs of cork or anything else that would violate baseball rules.

The shrine ran the bats through X-rays and CT scans after the Chicago Cubs' superstar slugger was ejected from a game for using a corked bat. Baseball officials also tested 76 of Sosa's bats they confiscated from his locker and found no cork in any of them.

"We felt it was important to remove any doubt about the integrity of the five bats in our collection," Hall spokesman Jeff Idelson said Thursday in Cooperstown, N.Y.

Sosa is expected to be suspended by the weekend for using the corked bat in the Cubs' game Tuesday at Wrigley Field. He said he mistakenly picked up a bat he had used during batting practice.

Sosa hit his 500th home run on April 4 and gave the bat from the historic shot to a Hall representative in an on-field presentation at Wrigley on April 13.

The other four Sosa bats were donated in 1998, and three of them were collected in person by the Hall.

Those four bats were used when he set a major league record with 20 homers in a month, when he broke Hack Wilson's team mark of 56 homers, when he surpassed Roger Maris' mark of 61 and another he used later in the season.

Two of Sosa's bats -- the one for No. 500 and another he used to hit homers No. 64-66 -- are on display at The Field Museum in Chicago.

Hall chairman Jane Forbes Clark traveled to Chicago late Wednesday night, and the two bats were put through an X-ray machine and a CT scan at the University of Chicago Medical Center.

The three other Sosa bats in the Hall's possession were X-rayed Wednesday at the Mary Imogene Bassett Hospital in Cooperstown and were run through a CT scan Wednesday morning by a radiologist. Those three bats were not on display at the Hall.

 

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