Corked Bats : Getting To The Bottom of ‘Batgate’

There is a double-edged mystery about the strange saga of Cleveland’s Albert Belle and the corked bat.

First, there is the matter of identifying the undersized second story man who went through a tiny crawlspace filled with air conditioning ducts and insulation at Comiskey Park to get into the umpires’ dressing room and temporarily lift the evidence. Cleveland, remember, is the same franchise once owned by the man who sent 3-foot-7 Eddie Gaedel to the plate.

Then, there is the question of exactly what Belle thought he was going to accomplish if he indeed was corking his bat. The Indians slugger, who doesn’t say much in the best of times and even less at moments like this, is not telling. It is interesting to note, however, that Belle had 26 home runs before his bat was confiscated and seven in nine games without it.

The folks at Louisville Slugger have done extensive testing on the effects of plugging the middle of bats with stuff other than wood. “What it does,” said Chuck Schupp, manager of professional baseball promotions for the company, “is reduce weight which produces quicker bat speed. But it also reduces mass so the bat doesn’t drive the ball as far.”

This Albert, remember, is Belle. The Albert who did all that work with energy and mass was Einstein.

And if it’s a lighter bat Belle wanted, he needed only change from his standard model B343, a 35-inch, 33-ounce Louisville Slugger, to something lighter. The up side to that solution is that it would be legal and avoid six-day suspensions.

“It’s unfortunate,” Schupp said. “First, it’s something he doesn’t need and second, now people wonder how long he’d been doing it and it casts a shadow on his accomplishments.”

Professor Robert Adair, who teaches physics at Yale University and has done his own tinkering with bats, said there are other legal options that would not have gotten Belle in hot water with American League president Bobby Brown.

“He could choke up three-quarters of an inch,” Adair said. “He could saw three-eighths of an inch off the end. He could use a lighter wood.”

The point, Adair said, is corking the bat doesn’t change things much. “A corked bat will increase bat speed but won’t hit the ball as far,” he said. “You also reduce the length of the sweet spot. How far you hit a ball depends on mass. If you want a really light bat, try swinging one made of Styrofoam. The ball would brush it away because it’s not heavy enough.

“At a given speed, a light bat won’t hit a ball as far as a heavy one.”

So why fool around with the wood? Adair thinks he knows.

“Say you’re being paid $1 million to hit .260,” he said. “It’s June and you’re hitting .225. Your timing is all messed up, but you love your bat. So you drill a six-inch hole, fill it with cork, plug it, smear it with tobacco juice so the umpire won’t notice and suddenly, your 32-ounce bat is 30 ounces. Your swing is quick and your timing is back.

“You’d be better off leaving it hollow, although that might not sound right.”

Jeff Di Tullio, an instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, thinks he has a better idea. If you want a quicker bat, he reasoned, make the bat more aerodynamic. And to do that, you merely borrow the dimples that make golf balls fly great distances.

Di Tullio pressed various patterns of dimples into the ends of bats and tested them in MIT’s wind tunnel. When he got it just right, he patented the bat and took it out to Fenway Park to let some of the Boston Red Sox try it out.

“Some of the guys liked it,” he said, “but more of them couldn’t tell the difference.”

No surprise there. In this season of offense, the Red Sox are near the bottom in American League team batting. What would they know about hitting?

“A lot that players believe about the science of hitting has nothing to do with the law of physics,” Schupp said. “Their point of reference is the guy sitting at the next locker.”

If the guy sitting next to Belle is 3-foot-7, we may have solved the mystery.