Ridge Runner Chronicles: The Curious History of the “Corked Bat”
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By Bill Hoagland
Another season of MLB baseball is underway. The hot topic this year is the “torpedo bat”, a bat in which the thick end of the bat is extended to the middle of the bat because a MIT graduate figured out that it is actually the middle of the bat, not the thick part, that all too often makes contact with a pitched ball. The good news for MLB players is that this bat is legal, unlike the “corked bat” that was secretly used by certain major league players over a span of about 20 years. (A corked bat has a hollowed-out portion in the wood that is filled with cork that makes the bat lighter and easier to swing, thereby allegedly increasing the velocity of a ball hit by a corked bat. Major league rules require that all bats be made out of a single piece of wood and that is the “official” reason why corked bats are illegal.)
During the corked bat era, certain major league teams (such as the St. Louis Cardinals) wanted to catch players on other teams using a “corked bat” because if a player were caught, he would be suspended and out of action for a period of time, thus benefiting the team that turned him in. Obviously, a corked bat was glued so that the corked portion of the bat was internal and not obvious to a casual observer. But this subterfuge merely motivated others to catch the bad guys, with some amusing situations along the way.
For example, Pete Rose for years denied that he used a corked bat. But two memorabilia collectors who had purchased two of his bats eventually had those bats x-rayed and surprise, surprise, those bats were corked. Then we have the case of Wilton Guerrero, of the Dodgers, who broke his bat during a game and took the unusual step of leaving the batter’s box to pick up all pieces of the broken bat that were scattered around the infield before anyone else could get to them. Surprise, surprise, he too was using a corked bat.
But the grand prize for catching the user of a corked bat has to be awarded to the Chicago White Sox. Just before the start of a game with the Cleveland Indians on July 15, 1994 at Comiskey Park, the manager for the White Sox told Umpire Dave Phillips that slugger Albert Belle of the Indians was using a corked bat. Phillips confiscated Belle’s bat and took it to the umpire’s locker room to safeguard it until it could be more closely examined. Then during the game and while the umpires were on the field, Jason Grimsley, a relief pitcher for the Indians, wormed his way through the crawl space above the locker rooms to the umpires’ locker room, dropped down and substituted another bat for the confiscated bat and crawled back to the Indian dugout with the confiscated bat. Unfortunately for the Indians, all of Albert Belle’s bats were corked so Grimsley had to take a bat belonging to Paul Sorrento. That bat was marked with Sorrento’s name on it; Phillips noticed that it was not the same bat that had been confiscated and he demanded that the original bat be returned immediately. Days later, the confiscated bat was examined and determined to be a corked bat, resulting in a suspension for Albert Belle.
You would assume that the days of the corked bat brouhaha are over, right? And with the instant success of the torpedo bat, no one would suspect that any player would still be using a corked bat if his batting skills dramatically improved. But if no one is on the lookout for corked bats these days and if there are gamblers today betting on the individual statistics of specific batters, is it so brazen to suggest that there still might be some corked bats out there? And we all know that those idolized major league players are beyond doing anything illegal, right?
Note: Some of the facts in this column came from a great column on corked bats written by Mark Holier at www.almostcooperstown.com. As noted in that column, the corked bat, being lighter, does allow the batter an additional split second to swing at a pitch and having that extra half-second that may explain why corked bats over the years have been so helpful for a batter.
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ν Bill Hoagland has practiced law in Alton for more than 50 years, but he has spent more than 70 years hunting, fishing and generally being in the great outdoors. His wife, Annie, shares his love of the outdoor life. Much of their spare time is spent on their farm in Calhoun County. Bill can be reached at [email protected].
