Popping the cork on corked bats
Paul White wrote an excellent article last week on Detroit Tiger Norm Cash’s amazing 1961 season. I have always wondered about that season and admired Cash for what was (as Paul points out) by far his best season. The story goes that years later Cash admitted to using corked bats that season and Stormin’ Norman, as he was called, thought that those corked bats did help him in that amazing season. But he really didn’t know.
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In MLB, September and October are ‘cork-popping’ season. It’s time to pop the cork on corking bats. When Howard Johnson of the Mets led the National League in home runs with 36 in 1987, HOF manager Whitey Herzog of the rival Cardinals, was convinced HoJo was corking his bats.
Baseball has a rule for the corking of bats:
Using a corked bat in Major League Baseball is in violation of Rule 6.03 (a)(5), which states a batter is out for illegal action when he 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. This includes bats that are filled, flat-surfaced, nailed, hollowed, grooved or covered with a substance such as paraffin, wax, etc.[4]
Do corked bats really make a difference to hitters?
One of the advantages of living in 2024 is that there are more and better ways to measure age-old tropes. The science of corking a bat has always intrigued me. I found this from MIT Technology review:
“In June 2003, the world of baseball was shocked by the revelation that Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs, one of the game’s finest sluggers, had been caught using an illegal bat.
So-called “corked” bats have been hollowed out and filled with a lighter material, such as cork, to disguise the modification. They are illegal because they allow batters to hit the ball further, or so the anecdotal evidence suggestions. The question for science, of course, is whether this effect is real: do corked bats really send balls further?
The reason bats are modified in this way is to make them lighter. This allows the hitter to swing them faster. But if the goal is to give the ball the highest possible velocity as it leaves the bat, lighter is not necessarily better. In fact,
the collision efficiency, the ratio of ball velocities before and after being hit, is lower for a lighter bat.
There is another factor, the so-called trampoline effect in which the surface of a hollowed-out bat deforms and reforms like a trampoline, thereby increasing the elasticity of the collision. This is known to occur in hollow metal bats but whether this holds true for wooden ones is still open.
Whether a corked bat gives an unfair advantage boils down to how these factors even out under the kind of ball speeds that occur in a real game.
Today, we have an answer thanks to some intriguing work by Alan Nathan at the University of Illinois and a few buddies. They’ve built a cannon capable of firing baseballs in a highly controlled fashion. They’ve used their machine to send balls at baseball bats modified in various ways and then measured the speed at which the balls impact and rebound. This they say has allowed them to settle the matter.
They have two results. First, they say the trampoline effect is negligible in corked bats. In other words, there is no increase in the elasticity of the bat-ball collision.
Second, they investigated the tradeoff between higher bat speed and lower collision efficiency and found no benefit to a corked bat.
“We conclude that there is no advantage to corking a bat if the goal is for the batted ball speed to be as large as possible, as is the case for a home run hitter,” they say.
However, there is a caveat. Being able to swing the bat faster allows the hitter to delay the swing for a crucial extra fraction of a second. And this may allow more accurate hits. “So, while corking may not allow a batter to hit the ball farther, it may well allow a batter to hit the ball solidly more often,” say Nathan and co.”
If you want to go even further down the rabbit hole you can read a 2011 article from the Journal of Physics ‘Corked Bats, Juiced Balls, and Humidors’.
Without evidence of improved performance with the use of a ‘corked’ bat it all seems silly until you remember one thing — the player thought it WOULD work and therefore the intent to cheat is clear. It’s not ‘gamesmanship’. Trying to put one over on pitchers and not having it make a measurable difference makes the effort that much sadder.
Besides HoJo and Sosa, who are the reputed corkers?
Since 1970, six players have been caught using corked bats. The following table summarizes these events:
From Wikipedia there were differing amounts of associated subterfuge from the accused:
· Nettles avoided a suspension after explaining that the bat was given to him by a fan.
· Hatcher had used a teammate’s bat after his own shattered, and was backed up on that claim by his manager, Hal Lanier.
· Sabo also denied knowledge that his bat had been tampered with, moreover the bat audibly cracked on a foul ball before breaking, leading the broadcast crew to question whether Sabo would have knowingly risked continuing to use a cracked illegal bat.
· Guerrero chased bat pieces after his lumber shattered, a rather unusual reaction, and later admitted to using it intentionally the prior few months. Belle’s teammates broke into the umpire’s room and exchanged the bat with an innocent one, but were caught doing so.[10]
Former players who have been accused of and/or admitted to using corked bats
· Former Kansas City Royals star Amos Otis
· Former player announcer, and National League president Bill White
· Former player and Major League manager Phil Garner admitted in January 2010 on a Houston radio station that he used a corked bat against Gaylord Perry and “hit a home run” with it.[12][13] Garner also admitted that the 2005 Houston Astros used corked bats during the 2005 MLB season and 2005 World Series of which he was the manager.[12] I
· In 2010, Deadspin reported that Pete Rose used corked bats during his 1985 pursuit of Ty Cobb’s all-time hits record. Two sports memorabilia collectors who owned Rose’s game-used bats from that season had the bats x-rayed and found the telltale signs of corking.[14][15] Rose had previously denied using corked bats.[16]
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Whitey Herzog tried confiscating Howard Johnson’s bats but was never able to find hard (or cork soft) evidence. With Sosa being the last player ‘caught’ corking, it makes you wonder how in more than 20 years, nobody else has been caught doing it.
Maybe the players already knew corking a bat doesn’t make a difference!
About the Author: Mark Kolier along with his son Gordon co-hosts a baseball podcast called ‘Almost Cooperstown’. He also has written baseball-related articles that can be accessed on Medium.com and Substack.com.
