Off Wing Opinion

At Wrigley Field, Sammy Sosa has been ejected from a game against the Devil Rays for using a corked bat. Details to follow.

UPDATE: Here's the AP account of what happened in the first inning:

The Cubs had runners at second and third when Sosa broke his bat with a grounder to second that at first appeared to drive in a run. But crew chief Tim McClelland gathered with the other three umpires to examine the bat. Cubs manager Dusty Baker came out and the umpires showed the bat to him.

Mark Grudzielanek was sent back to third base, the run was wiped off the board and Sosa was ejected as he stood in the dugout.

UPDATE: A researcher at the National Institutes for Standards and Technology says there isn't any benefit to corking bat at all. Another researcher explained it this way:

The natural frequency of wooden bats is around 250 cycles per second, or 250 Hertz. Because the ball leaves the bat so soon (a millisecond), the energy transfer to the ball is not too efficient. If the bat has been hollowed and corked, it's no longer as stiff, and it will get an even lower natural frequency and an even less efficient transfer of energy to the bat. The baseball bounces off the bat, faster than the cork can store the energy that could be put back in the ball. The cork might deaden the sound of a hollowed out bat, but it doesn't propel the ball. It can't. So, balls hit with corked bats don't go as far. . .

The feel of a bat is a strange and wonderful thing. Ripping it's heart out and stuffing it with dried bark is almost, uh ... unnatural. It won't push the ball out to the fence. It's a natural frequency transfer of energy phenomenon. It's science.

UPDATE: I just watched Sosa's brief post-game press conference, and his explanation boiled down to this: he uses a corked bat to "put on a show" in batting practice before games; tonight, he accidentally used the bat in the game; and he doesn't have any other corked bats. Further, Major League Baseball impounded all of Sosa's bats in the midst of the game.

Just watching Sosa, it seemed to me that he was telling the truth, but we'll only know for sure once MLB x-Rays the rest of Sosa's bats.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2003 at 9:04 pm by Eric McErlain and is filed under Baseball. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.