These Splinters Were Far From Splendid

Say it ain’t Sosa?

Say it ain’t sawdust.

You had to blink once or twice, especially if you weren’t wearing protective woodshop goggles, if you tuned into ESPN midday Wednesday and saw two grown men gripping both ends of a baseball bat and another man sawing the bat in half.

In simpler times, the three national faces of Chicago Cubs baseball belonged to Tinker, Evers and Chance.

On the first Wednesday of June 2003, it was Scot Monette, president of Authentic Sports Investments, and two assistants taking a handsaw to the bat that Sammy Sosa used to strike the 498th home run of his big league career.

Two pairs of sweaty palms gripped the bat while the saw slowly dug into the wood.

“You need a vise, guys,” baseball-and-carpentry expert Bobby Valentine advised from his studio seat.

A remote camera zoomed in to show the saw struggling mightily, spitting out stubborn splinters.

“Electric saw, boys,” Valentine chimed in again. They always did say Valentine was a know-it-all.

You had to see it see it to believe it, all the while double-checking the TV listings to make sure you weren’t watching “Trading Spaces.”

No, this was ESPN, devoting a special two-hour “SportsCenter” to the Sammy Sosa corked bat crisis, or as ESPN christened the proceedings with an ever-present logo: “Say It Ain’t Sosa.”

Monette and his crew were searching for buried treasure, kind of like when Geraldo Rivera went digging into the secret vault of another Chicago big hitter, Al Capone. Although this, quite obviously, was an entirely different sort of hack journalism.

The golf-shirted lumberjacks chopped Sosa’s bat in half, found nothing unusual, then went to work on the upper barrel.

“They are nearly all the way through it,” said Karl Ravech, providing the play-by-play.

“So we [already] have seen the bottom of the barrel. If you’re going to cork a bat, Bobby, is this the area?”

Valentine reported, “It would have to be there. Exactly. The cork would have to be right there.”

Monette displayed the cross-section of the upper barrel. Once again, nothing but wood grain, all of it legal.

Just like Geraldo, who discovered only dirt and one empty beer bottle when he cracked open Capone’s vault in 1986.

“Well,” Valentine said, “he hit one without cork in it.”

Harold Reynolds, seated next to Valentine, concluded: “That’s good for Sammy.”

And good for Monette, whose company deals in sports collectibles. With an entire country suddenly questioning the validity of Sosa’s home run records, Monette decided to sacrifice one historic Sosa bat -- worth up to $10,000, Monette estimated -- in order to save the reputation, and value, of dozens of others.

“We have seen 150 bats of Sammy Sosa over the last year and a half,” Monette said, “and not one of them have been corked.... Hopefully, Sammy will be exonerated.”

Any other result would be bad for business, and not only Monette’s. Baseball, already rocked by allegations of juiced balls and juiced sluggers, can hardly take a hit to the integrity of its most marketable player, Smilin’ Slammin’ Sammy, who teamed with Mark McGwire in 1998 to save the sport from the dinosaur boneyard.

In the wake of the cork found inside Sosa’s broken bat Tuesday, baseball responded with unusual and astonishing speed. Not long after Monette’s loggers completed their task, George Will appeared on-screen to inform that Major League Baseball had finished an examination of 76 Sosa bats and did not find cork deposits in any of them.

Yes, George Will. In times such as these, Bud Selig needs friends in high places, so Will, a member of the commissioner’s initiative panel, was quickly dispatched to break the news.

Fortunately, time was tight.

Will’s partial text:

“Major League Baseball, of course, values Sammy Sosa. He is ... one of the most liked and marketable of the baseball stars. He’s a tremendous asset to the industry itself, as well as to his team. And before he takes the field with that long running arc into right field as he usually does in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field, Major League Baseball would like it to be as friendly as possible, and would like, I think, this news to be known by as many people as possible.

“This, of course, is not the end of the story, but it is a substantial step one would have to say toward vindicating what Sammy Sosa said last night, that this was an accident resulting from an aberration, not part of a pattern of behavior on his part in championship games.”

Translation: Selig really hopes this was a one-time incident.

Because if it isn’t, one souvenir Sammy Sosa bat won’t be the only thing reduced to kindling.