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Monday, Nov 23, 2009
How corking your bat is a lot like a Martha Stewart stock deal, but nothing like throwing a spitball.
Jun 5, 2003 | Is Sammy Sosa a cheater? Are his considerable accomplishments tainted in the wake of Tuesday's embarrassing corked-bat incident? Why'd he do it? Did he do it? What's the big deal if he did do it? And what's Martha Stewart got to do with it?
A baseball saying goes, "If you ain't cheatin', you ain't competin'," and it's safe to say that if competing has been going on longer than cheating has, it's only by a matter of minutes. Cain beaned Abel, then said, "I was just pitching inside!"
Sosa insists he wasn't cheatin' Tuesday when he swung a corked bat in a game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. The Cubs slugger says he simply picked up the wrong bat, an honest mistake, revealed when the bat shattered as he hit a weak grounder to second.
We can believe him or not. No cork was found in the 76 bats baseball confiscated from him, so his story looks pretty good. On the other hand, it's more fun not to believe him, and there's still a nice little pile of circumstantial evidence arrayed against him.
For one thing, he's been slumping badly this year, putting up numbers over his last 20 games or so that are usually associated with weak-hitting middle infielders. No one worships weak-hitting middle infielders. Very few Alex Cora posters hang on bedroom walls, and Neifi Perez hasn't schmoozed the president. It's widely believed among baseball players that putting cork in a bat makes the ball go farther. Perhaps Slumpin' Sammy believed he needed a little edge to get his mojo back?
There's also the lameness of Sosa's excuse. He says he uses corked bats, which are illegal for games, in batting practice "to put on a show for the fans." He somehow picked up one of those bats at game time.
It's a little hard to believe that Sosa, a professional hitter of the highest caliber, isn't aware of his own most important tool as he carries it to work. The guilty bat reportedly had a "C" marked on the barrel, which would seem to support Sosa's story -- you wouldn't write "C" for cork on a bat if you were trying to hide the fact that it has cork in it -- but if you had illegal bats around, wouldn't you make them radically different from your regular bats, just to avoid confusion? If it's just a batting practice bat, paint stripes on it.
And sure, 76 other bats were clean, but that doesn't mean he didn't know the one bat he used was dirty. We're supposed to believe that the one and only time Sosa, oops, used the wrong bat, it split lengthwise, revealing the cork inside? Tough break.
All of this was being debated on Wednesday as Martha Stewart did her perp walk and got indicted in an insider stock trading case. As with Sosa, we don't know whether Stewart, accused of unloading ImClone stock after being tipped off about a government ruling unfavorable to the biotech company, is guilty.
We do know this about both of them, though: If they're guilty, they're crazy.
Stewart allegedly made her stock deal to keep from losing $45,000. Last year her company reported $295 million in sales. Let's say you have a nice job, you make $59,000 a year, just to pick a number. Are you going to do something that risks your livelihood and your reputation to avoid losing nine bucks? Because that's the equivalent.
It's the same with Sosa. He's on his way to the Hall of Fame. A little local build-you-up just to tear-you-down media carping in Chicago aside, he's a beloved figure in at least two countries, the United States and his native Dominican Republic. His poster hangs on countless bedroom walls. He schmoozes presidents. He's going to risk his reputation, maybe even his smooth ride to Cooperstown, for the dubious benefits to be found in a corked bat?
"It's weird," said former teammate Mark Grace, now with Arizona. "Instead of hitting them 500 feet, he wants to hit them 550, I guess."
