Players may have another reason to cork their bats: to make the bats lighter so players can, in baseball argot, “get around on a pitch” quicker, allowing them to wait a split second longer before swinging, which gives them more time to judge a ball’s path and to make adjustments during the swing. “That’s not to say that baseball players are dumb,” Smith is quick to add. “Corking will not help you hit the ball farther,” says Smith. By once again firing a ball at a bat at WSU’s Sports Science Laboratory, the researchers found that a heavier bat still hit the ball harder (and therefore farther) than a lighter, corked bat. So there’s a trade-off, says Lloyd Smith, an associate professor of engineering at Washington State University and a co-author on the paper. Right?Ī batter indeed can swing a lighter bat faster, but a lighter bat has less inertia. Their conclusion: the trampoline effect was bogus.īut there was another way corking might work: a corked bat is a few ounces lighter than an unadulterated one, and a lighter bat means a batter can swing faster, which means he can generate more force and hit the ball farther.
If anything, the ball came off the corked bat with a slower speed than off a normal bat. So the researchers hollowed out a bat, stuffed it with bits of cork and fired a ball at the bat from a cannon. “There was some anecdotal information from players that there’s something like a ‘trampoline effect’ when the ball bounces off a corked bat,” says Nathan, one of the authors of the new study. It was scandalous…but does it work? That’s the question that intrigued Alan Nathan, a professor emeritus of physics at the University of Illinois (and a die-hard Red Sox fan). A corked bat is one in which a cavity is drilled out of the barrel and filled with a lightweight material such as cork. In June 2003, Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa was caught using an illegal corked bat-hardly the first time it’s happened in the Major Leagues. The results are published in “Corked Bats, Juiced Balls, and Humidors: The Physics of Cheating in Baseball” in the June issue of the American Journal of Physics.
To separate fact from fiction, four scientists from three universities spent days firing baseballs at bats. And can making a baseball moister really thwart a slugger from putting one in the bleachers? Well, maybe-depending on how hot it is outside. But not all trickery actually works, especially in baseball.Ī corked bat can hit the ball farther, right? That’s a myth, say physicists studying the national pastime. Cheating in sports might be as old as the race between the tortoise and the hare.
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