Buck O’Neil once said, “As long as baseball is around, guys will be looking to get ahead.”</p><p>That includes using doctored bats, which are not allowed in Major League Baseball. From 1994 to 2003, four players were suspended for corking their bats. But since Sammy Sosa was caught six years ago, no one has been busted. </p><p>Perhaps that’s because the players have been brushing up on their science. Research has shown there is little if any benefit to using a corked bat if the desired outcome is to hit the ball farther.</p><p>Here’s how corking works. A player drills out about a 1-inch diameter hole in the barrel of a wood bat and replaces it with cork. That makes the bat lighter and moves the bat’s center of mass toward the handle. This lowers the moment of inertia which makes the bat easier to swing.</p><p>“Lowering the moment of inertia should work in favor of hitting the ball faster,” said Michael Kruger, chairman of the physics department at UMKC.</p><p>But does that help you hit the ball a longer distance? Probably not, because the corked bat is lighter and heavier bats make the ball go farther.</p><p>Also, the thinking at one time was that the springiness of the cork would make the ball travel farther off the bat.</p><p>However, in his book “The Physics of Baseball,” Robert Adair writes, “Even if the filler is quite elastic, such as superball rubber, its elastic energy cannot be transferred efficiently to the bat in the 0.6-millisecond bat-ball collision.”</p><p>Tests done in 2002 by the Baseball Research Center at the University of Massachusetts-Lowell found that corked bats outperformed a solid wood bat by approximately 1 percent. </p><p>But tests performed two years later by Daniel Russell of Kettering University in Michigan, Lloyd Smith of Washington State and Alan Nathan at the University of Illinois found no appreciable benefit.</p><p>Working at the Sports Science Laboratory at Washington State, the professors measured the coefficient of restitution (COR) of a ball coming off a bat. In a nutshell, COR is the bounciness of an object. In a corked bat the professors found the COR was roughly .488; in a regular bat it was .490.</p><p>So how could the two studies differ?</p><p>“To my way of looking they did get the same answer,” Kruger said, “and the same answer seems to be that there doesn’t seem to be much difference in the batted ball speed.”</p><p>So why cork a bat? While the process may not generate more power, a lighter bat has other benefits. A player would have more time to decide whether or not to swing at a pitch and more time to react to a pitch.</p><p>“If the bat does swing lighter, you have better control over it,” Kruger said. “You have more control and reaction time and that is not something you can measure with a machine in a lab. You’d have to get people out there and do experiments.”</p><p>Adair notes in his book that players can achieve the same benefits of corking by cutting a little off the end of the bat, choking up on the bat or using a bat with a concave end in the barrel.</p><p>Best of all, that’s all legal.