Cork of art

Sosa uses an illegal bat just for show? Maybe

You watch baseball games partly because you never know what you'll see. You might see a perfect game, or a triple play or a guy hit for the cycle. You might see a pitch kill a pigeon. And if you're really lucky you'll see a home run king snap his bat on a ground ball, revealing a wedge of cork in the barrel.

That happened in the Devil Rays-Cubs game Tuesday night, when Sammy Sosa was ejected after umpires found cork in his shattered bat. Sosa's excuse was so priceless your MasterCard couldn't have bought it. "I use that bat for batting practice," he said. "I just picked the wrong bat [for the game]."

Ohhh. So Sosa isn't a cheat. He's a concerned and caring major leaguer doing everything he can to entertain overcharged fans by hitting home runs during BP. "I want to make people happy," he said in his defense. I'm pretty sure this puts Sosa in line for some kind of community service award.

Against all odds, and in a spectacular state of denial, several fellow Cubs found ways to support Sosa. Chicago manager Dusty Baker even asserted that Sosa was "innocent until proven guilty," apparently forgetting an important conditional in U.S. law, which reads: "You're innocent until proven guilty ... or until umpire Tim McClelland, and millions of viewers on television, catch you cork-handed."

It's all so quaint. Kids, if you want to be a big-league slugger, you don't have to eat androstenedione the way Mark McGwire did. You don't have to work your biceps up to the size of basketballs. You just have to doctor your bat, as some players in the good old days.

There's a long list of bat-corkers who were caught in the act: Albert Belle, Billy Hatcher, Wilton Guerrero, Norm Cash, who won the 1961 American League batting title, and also, Kostya Kennedy.

When I was 10 and in Little League my friend Steve and I did it the old-fashioned way. I went to Woolworth's and bought a Louisville Slugger, Little League model. Using a hand drill and a half-inch bit, we bore a hole right down the middle of the barrel, seven inches deep. We used a tape measure and everything.

We found a few corks in a drawer in my parents' kitchen -- they drank red Riojas, as I recall -- and broke them up into pieces the size of raisins. Then we stuffed the pieces in the bat and topped the hole off with some yellow sludgy stuff called plastic wood. "If Coach Morris finds out, we're dead," I said.

Steve, who had also taught me to grease the underside of my cap-bill with Vaseline on days I was pitching, told me not to worry. That weekend, as I remember, we both had a couple of hits, and Steve hit a double in the sixth to help us beat the Red Raiders.

I'm not sure how we figured out the way to cork our bats, but the information probably came from The Bronx Zoo or Ball Four or one of the other books that revealed all you really needed to know about baseball. In any event, our drilling method was more or less the same as that employed by former Royals outfielder Amos Otis, who hit 193 career home runs and afterward famously explained: "I had enough cork and superballs in there to blow away anything. It probably meant about 193 home runs for me."

Of course, none of us other bat-corkers was the heavy hitter that Sammy is today, so there is sure to be a lot of hand-wringing about what this mishap does to Sosa's reputation and to his standing as one of the great home run hitters of his generation. Let's say that bat-corking has meant, I don't know, 193 home runs to him over his career. Subtracting that chunk would drop him down to a total of 312, which would never, ever get him into the Hall of Fame.

Poor Sosa sure seemed embarrassed as he hemmed and hawed through his late-night press conference. He said "um" and "you know" a lot and you couldn't help but wonder what he'd say with Wonder Woman's lasso wrapped around him.

But, really, Sosa needn't be ashamed. Perhaps he's not the pure home run hitter we all thought he was, but he is part of a grand tradition. How many of you would have done it differently? No one knows for sure that corking works -- it makes the bat more springy, some claim; it makes the bat lighter, say others -- but a good number of hitters are happy to try it. "Had I known there were corked bats in the bat rack," Diamondbacks first baseman Mark Grace, a former Cub, told the Associated Press last night, "I certainly would have been using them too."

There may be a small casualty to all of this, should Sosa be suspended and deprive us of a matchup with 300-win seeker Roger Clemens at Wrigley Field this Saturday. Then again, this may be a blessing. If Sosa had waited and broken his bat against Clemens, the big pitcher might have picked up a shard and winged it at Sosa as he ran to first. Hey, it's happened before.

Sports Illustrated senior writer Kostya Kennedy takes sides each week at SI.com.

 

Related information

Stories

Previous Kostya Kennedy columns Tom Verducci's Mailbag: Sosa uncorks doubts Head2Head: Does this ruin Sosa's image?

Multimedia

Visit Video Plus for the latest audio and video