Asymmetrical Information

Major league baseball should either (1) allow any bats made of wood, cork included, or (2)supply a mix of bats to each team prior to the game just like they supply the baseballs.

Here in Chicago, "corkgate" is basically all the media is talking about. I'm not just talking about sports-talk shows. It's been the lead story on the local news. I turned on the TV at 5:00 this morning, and here was a guy doing a live remote from Wrigley Field (one of my favorite Stupid Media Tricks (tm), the gratuitous live remote). The news-talk station I listen too interrupted regular programming this afternoon to carry a press conference given by Andy McPhail (the Cubs' GM) to announce basically nothing. Of course, ESPN was all over this too.

Now I'm as muh of a Cubs fan as the next masochistic North Sider, but really, this is silly. I don't think they would have given this more coverage if Sosa had killed a guy. Christ, Ray Lewis *did* kill a guy, and I don't think they made that big a deal of it.

Whoa, I think it too early to jump to any adamant conclusions. Sammy Sosa may have very well made an honest mistake. I need to see more evidence before I demand his lynching.

I'm dubious of Sosa - but as Yogi Berra said, "It ain't over 'till it's over."

The evidence I've seen indicates that the main effects of corking a bat are psychological--the actual effect on a batted ball is negligible. Sammy should get a ten game suspension, as is customary in these cases, and life should go on. The main positive effect of this incident should be that certain people will have something to do other than make unsupported accusations that Barry Bonds is using steroids and/or other performance enhancing drugs.

...and they still can't win the world series

Yes, far too early to jump to conclusions.

It's not as if his bat shattered and there was cork in it right there on the field. If that had happened, well then conclusion jumping could be justified.

Major League Baseball does not supply the baseballs.

The home team supplies the baseballs.

Rule 3.01:

Before the game begins the umpire shall:... (c) Receive from the home club a supply of regulation baseballs...

Let’s get to the nitty-gritty: this incident will be mostly forgotten if Sammy Sosa’s home run numbers don’t fall off. We will merely shrug our shoulders and turn to other sports issues to argue about. However, God help Sosa’s place in baseball history if he barely hits twenty homers a year from here on end.

He'll probably get a 7-10 game suspension today, work on his swing, which has been totally ruined since his helmet got shattered by that Salomon Torres fastball, and go on to hit another 30-35 homers this season.

As someone who hopes the Cubs totally fold up and blow away (being a disAstros fan), I think Sammy is a genuinely good guy and that this will remain a minor blotch on his Hall of Fame career. It only sticks if you cork your bat AND you're a complete jackass, like Albert Belle (whose own teammate ratted on him... his bat didn't even break).

I'll just be glad when this all blows over and The Media can get back to covering the important issues, like Scott Peterson and Martha Stewart.

1) Dreck, the link to the Sosa article is no good.

2) I 'll give Sammy the benefit of the doubt. Major League Baseball has declared that Sosa's 76 other bats were all clean. Sosa's mistake was neglecting to label his batting practice bat to ensure he never used it in a game.

I'm shocked...SHOCKED, I tell you...that a MLB player has been implicated in an act of cheating. Why, it's simply UNHEARD OF that pro ball players would break the rules.

Cheating (and your ability in plying such craft without being caught) is as much a part MLB as spitting, scratching, and complaining. It's literally part of the lore of the game. People speak with wistful reverence about this or that pitcher and the lengths he went to to hide the razor blade or dab of Vaseline God-knows-where. EVERYBODY KNOWS that there's rampant cheating. It's like a big t-rd in the punchbowl. And, if it so chose, MLB could really crack down on it. But it hasn't, and likely never will.

I'm a lifelong Cubs fan, but I suspect Sammy's alibi is a load of crap (who in their right mind would take BP with a LIGHTER bat??!!..although maybe that would explain his plummeting power and average). Yes, his image in my mind is tarnished a bit...but only because I try to plead willful and blissful ignorance of the rampant cheating that goes on in MLB every day. I hoped that maybe Sammy was different, but apparently not.

I love baseball. But being a serious and somewhat accomplished golfer, I could never understand the baseball player's attitude about following the rules of their chosen game. What's a game without rules? A game IS a collection of rules. Without them, there's no game. Sure, there are golfers out there who cheat. Once caught, however, they are ostrasized and shamed beyond belief. Golfers pride themselves on their integrity. Baseball players pride themselves on avoiding detection.

I'm very proud of the fact that I've talked about Sammy Sosa for all of 30 seconds in the past six hours of my talk show.

I did have to rant on Martha Stewart for a couple of minutes today, but this is really a non-story of epic proportions.

2) I 'll give Sammy the benefit of the doubt. Major League Baseball has declared that Sosa's 76 other bats were all clean. Sosa's mistake was neglecting to label his batting practice bat to ensure he never used it in a game.

Why wouldn't they be clean? He probably knew he was unlikely to get a chance to use more than one in an actual game situation.

Indeed, several being corked might have made the batting practice excuse slightly more palatable.

Funny that he'd go to the trouble of corking a bat to such an extent that he couldn't tell it was a corked bat by looking at it if he was only going to hit a few practice shots with it.

Equally amazing is that he'd be able to select it correctly during batting practice, in order to, you know, please the fans, but it completely buffaloed him during the first inning.

I can't figure out what the players think they're accomplishing with a bat lightened at precisely the point where, ceteris paribus, more weight means a more powerful impact, and more distance traveled. I'd ask a certain Northwestern economist who's married to a physicist to get us a professional opinion on it, but I suspect she's heartbroken and doesn't want to be reminded.

But, for all the Mets fans suffering through another disastrous season, soon you'll have a brief opportunity to witness baseball as it was meant to be played (don't need no stinkin' corked bats):

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/sports/134908098_mari05.html

Patrick's right.

Decreasing the weight of a 31 oz bat to 30 oz is about a 3% mass decrease. The force a player can impart to the bat is independent of what the bat weighs, as it's based on muscle strength. So F=m1a1=m2a2, where m2 = .97m1. Acceleration isn't what we're looking for, however; we want the velocity of the bat when it contacts the ball. If a player doesn't max out the bat velocity by the time he contacts the ball (which seems right to me), then the player can get the bat going somewhere between 0 and 3% faster at the time of contact, depending on what the "terminal velocity" is.

However, this begs the question: if he wanted to get the bat going faster, why didn't he just use a 30 oz non-corked bat to start with? The answer is that corking isn't done because it gives you better bat speed; that's entirely determined by mass. It's done because cork is reputed to have a better ability to transfer energy back to the ball; as argued here, that's hooey. There's no advantage to using corked bats; if you just wanted a bigger cross section/mass ratio, you could legally hollow out parts of the bat.

Cork stinks. Like a zillion other bits of institutional baseball wisdom, it's wrong.

There's no advantage to using corked bats; if you just wanted a bigger cross section/mass ratio, you could legally hollow out parts of the bat.

If you hollowed out parts of the bat, it would shatter more frequently when hitting a 90 mph pitched baseball. The cork reduces the mass without weakening the bat.

without weakening as much

key element... not as weak as it would be hollowed out (also why some people use superballs rather than cork... they are stronger)

"key element... not as weak as it would be hollowed out (also why some people use superballs rather than cork... they are stronger)"

That approach backfired on Graig Nettles rather drastically about thirty years ago, when a bat he was using shattered, sending superballs bouncing all over the place. IIRC, witnesses found the sight of the catcher running around grabbing superballs rather amusing.

Interesting conversation about the physics of baseball bats.

I'm certainly no physicist...but at some point, couldn't increased bat speed more than make up for less mass behind the ball? And, wouldn't corking the bat give it more "elasticity", so that the ball "springs" off the bat better?

I only ask these questions because as a golfer, I am acutely aware of the controversies surrounding modern golf equipment. Modern drivers are made out of space-age materials that are FAR lighter than the old steel-shafted, persimmon headed woods. The idea is that one can swing a lighter club a lot faster, which more than makes up for the reduction in mass. SPEED seems to be the key.

Second, the Royal & Ancient and USGA have proven (supposedly) that a driver clubface's "spring effect", or "coefficient of restitution", can have a material effect on the distance the ball flies. Indeed, the rules of golf now contain specific limits on the amount of "spring effect" a golf club may have. Golf club manufacturers have spent $$MM in R&D trying to push the C.O.R. envelope.

There are many factors in the dramatic and preposterous increase in distance that professionals are hitting golf balls these days. But the lightness and spring effect of their modern drivers is key among them.

Why wouldn't the same concept apply to bats and baseballs? Isn't the whole idea of an aluminum bat to take advantage of these characteristics?

Michael M is correct about the effect with metal headed golf clubs--I remember the first time I hit a cavity-backed iron; I felt the difference at impact. But these are WOODEN bats, not metal. Golf club manufacturers are not putting cork into persimmon head drivers for a reason.

The link Jason McCoullough provided covers the bases pretty well, summarily, you don't have a lot of time to transfer force from the bat to the ball. Anything that lightens the bat without compromising its stiffness (like making a bat from aluminum instead of wood) is a plus.

But anything that reduces that stiffness (like superballs or cork inside a wood bat) effectively acts as a shock absorber, enough so that the increase in swinging speed may not be able to compensate for the loss.

A greatly exaggerated way of looking at it would be the difference between a wood bat and a foam whiffle bat. Yeah, you can swing the whiffle bat a lot faster but...

The link Jason provided contains two falsehoods:

" A curve ball that seems to break over 14 inches never actually deviates from a straight line by more than 3 * inches

" There is no such thing in baseball as a rising fastball!"

As to the first claim, here's another physicist:

http://www.engr.arizona.edu/newsletters/SIEfall00/

saying the opposite: "A debate once raged for decades: Do baseballs really curve or is it an optical illusion? Wind tunnel experiments done in the 1950s answered that definitively -- they curve, sometimes by as much as 2 feet."

And a slider can break even more than that, I used to have one that, thrown to the middle of the plate, would break so much the catcher occassionally couldn't get a glove on it.

As to the rising fastball, the Arizona scientist goes into much detail arguing that Randy Johnson's fastball doesn't actually rise. Even getting Tony Gwinn to agree it doesn't. Inconvenient fact for these gentlemen; I've seen it rise three feet. And not from a batter's box, as is claimed produces the optical illusion.

I was in attendance at the Kingdome one June night in (iirc) 1990, sitting in the left-field bleachers. Prior to the game I watched Johnson warm up in the bullpen along the rightfield foul line (meaning my line of vision was perpendicular to the path of Johnson's pitches). Fastballs that were belt high halfway to the plate rose so much that the catcher was having to stand up to catch them.

I remember thinking that it would be impossible to hit such a pitch. And I turned out to be correct. Johnson no-hit the Detroit Tigers, with the final out coming when the Tiger hitter swung and missed a fastball that was over his head.

And you can do even more amazing things with a softball, such as throw a pitch that both rises and drops (I've been struck out on such pitches, and could throw one myself, occassionally).

It's good to see physicists bitten by the old economist joke; okay, so it works in practice, but does it work in theory.

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