The Futility Infielder

If you were within a mile of a TV set on Tuesday night, you know that Sammy Sosa was caught using a corked bat in a game against the Devil Rays. Between Baseball Tonight and SportsCenter, ESPN must have run the replay of Sosa's bat breaking over 200 times between 11 PM and 1 AM, accompanied by a slew of talking heads instantly speculating on what damage this will do to Sosa's career. This morning's reaction has some of the country's most esteemed (cough, cough, HACK) sportstwriters looking for tall trees over which to sling their ropes, ready to lynch Sosa and boot him from the Hall of Fame before his playing career is even done, and before MLB's disciplinarian, Bob Watson has handed down his sentence.

Don't be swayed. What Sosa did was wrong, but he immediately came forward and offered a fairly convincing explanation -- he mistakenly grabbed a bat that he uses to wow the crowds for batting practice and home run derbies. You don't necessarily have to buy that, but I do. Sosa's credit line is good with me, and not just because I once put him on the cover of a book. First of all, the accountability has to count for something. Sammy didn't hide, issue a denial or pass the buck to anybody else. He said, in essence, "My bad." We've seen superstars do a lot worse.

Second, we have zero proof that he's done this before. Think for a moment about the intense scrutiny the man's been under since he made the country's radar screen during the Great Home Run Chase of '98. Sammy's probably broken a few bats since then, while millions of people watched. None of them ever turned up corked, not a single one. So if somebody wants to tell us that the reason Sosa hit all those homers is a corked bat, the burden of proof is on them, not on Sosa.

Third, it's not even clear that a corked bat helps hitting homers. Cub Reporter Christian Ruzich has a lengthy excerpt from Robert Kemp Adair's The Physics of Baseball devoted to the subject. Basically, while corking one's bat allows a quicker swing, the ball's not likely to go as far -- about 3 feet off of a 400-foot drive. I don't know about you, but most of the Sosa homers I've seen didn't need that extra three feet. (Ruzich has links to more Sosa-related pieces than you can shake a corked bat at, so check him out today.)

Fourth, even if a corked bat DID help hit homers, baseball has a colorful history of gamesmanship that's as long as a Sosa homer. That history includes batters leaning into a pitch to get hit intentionally, catchers framing pitches so they appear to have crossed the plate in the strike zone, pitchers adding a little something extra to the ball, outfielders sno-coning balls, sign stealing (see the 1951 Giants) and so on. We smile bemusedly as we discuss Gaylord Perry's Vaseline, wink at Whitey Ford's wedding ring and giggle at the superballs that came out of Graig Nettles' bat. Spitballing at least has the precedent of being legal at one point in the game's history, but this really isn't that different. Baseball Tonight ran a lengthy clip of former co-host and current Texas Rangers manager Buck Showalter demonstrating in painstaking detail how to cork a bat. If Buck is adept enough to know how, and if ESPN is bothering to show us, doesn't that make this all a bit hypocritcal?

Fifth, baseball has a strong precedent for how to punish this. Sammy will be taking a vacation for about 7-10 games assuming that holds. Given that the Cubs are barely leading a tight NL Central, a suspension that sends the Cubs into another June swoon would be plenty of punishment right there.

Baseball's been berry, berry good to Sammy. And Sammy's been berry, berry good to baseball as well. In these contentious and often uncertain times, amid the game's labor strife and the country's war on terror, Sosa's given the fans an amiable mega-slugger to cheer and embrace while the likes of McGwire, Bonds and Griffey puckered as if sucking on lemons. Sosa's the most marketable player active, an ambassador for the game the world over, and he's helped countless writers fill up thousands upon thousands of column inches. Yet those same columnists are ready to hang him. Here's the New York Daily News' Bill Madden frothing at the mouth:

Make no mistake about this, however: There is no humor in Sosa being caught using a corked bat, only shame and disgrace. Worse, a huge shadow of distrust has been cast over baseball as Sosa, who on April 4 became the 18th player to join the elite 500 club, is now the only one of them known to have used a corked bat.

In other words, unless he can somehow prove otherwise, Sammy Sosa is a fraud and all of his home runs are now tainted. He is the only man in history to amass three 60-homer seasons and, to that, we now say: Yeah, right, and how many of them were hit with a legitimate bat?

...It has never been done before, but if Sosa is to have his credibility restored, Selig must order X-rays for the four bats (home runs 58, 62 and 66 in '98 and the 500th this year) that he donated to the Hall of Fame. And, if it turns out any of those were corked, Sosa should be banned from baseball for life and all his home runs be expunged from the record.

Okay Bill, time for your rabies shot. We never took away Gaylord Perry's Cy Youngs or forfeited any of his teams' games ex post facto, why should this be any different? And speaking of the Daily News, one can hardly wait for the other horseshit-covered shoe to drop, in the form of Mike Lupica telling us how disillusioned he is about the summer of '98 any minute now. Let's get a shovel and dig up Dick Young for his reaction(ary) while we're at it.

Here's Rick Telander of the Chicago Tribune, in his auto-hack, one-sentence-paragraph, gee-my-head-hurts-from-these-big-thoughts writing "style":

Sosa confessed.

"I just took the wrong bat and went up there,'' he said in the interview room. "I apologize from the bottom of my heart.''

Sosa said he keeps a corked bat to use during batting practice be-cause "I like to put on a show for the fans. I like to make people happy and show off.''

I believe that. I believe gangsters keep shotguns in their trunks to shoot rabbits. I believe the Tooth Fairy is married to the Easter Bunny.

I believe--I guarantee I be-lieve--that Sosa is a liar.

Puh-lease. If this doesn't show you the modus operandi of those newspaper hacks, ready to pounce on today's down-on-his-luck superstar in order to sell papers, then you'd better get a seeing eye dog. These people invested so much in deifying Sosa that once it's been revealed he is -- stop the presses -- human, they can only respond by trashing him.

Resist the temptation. Get mad at Sammy, boo him if you must the next time you see him. But let him serve his time and move on. Sammy's been too good to the game to keep this incident hanging over his head for long.