It was No . 33 on ESPN ’s lean of The 100 Most Memorable Moments of the Past 25 eld : Sammy Sosa , batting against the Devil Rays on June 4 , 2003 , shatter his chiropteran on a smasher against ewer Jeremi Gonzalez . When umpire Tim McClelland pick up the splintered lumber , he spots a art object of bobfloat wedged into the barrel . The incident left egg on Sosa ’s face and stirred up one of baseball game ’s biggest contention : Do cork bats givehittersan unjust reward ?
To resolve that dubiousness it help to empathise , literally , the ins and out of cork cricket bat . A rule Major League baseball squash racquet is a solid small-arm of lumber typically fashioned from either ash tree or maple Natalie Wood . Derek Jeter , for illustration , get around a Louisville Slugger made from ash tree . It ’s 34 inches farseeing and weighs 32 oz. ( 86 centimeters and 907 grams ) . Now take Jeter ’s squash racquet and exercise a cavity , lengthwise , into the barrel . Make certain the diameter of the cavity is around 1 inch ( 2.5 centimeters ) and that it reach out a deepness of about 10 inches ( 25.4 centimetre ) . meet the borehole with a lightweight fabric , such as cork or Styrofoam . Heck , if you have a few Super Balls lying around , you may rip up them up and omit the rubber part into the cavity . Finally , secure up the mess with Natalie Wood filler so your handiwork ca n’t be detected . When you ’re done , you have a corked at-bat . But why go to the trouble ?
Well , with wood removed from the barrel , the bat is light . We can work out how much because we know the property of the borehole . The volume of a cylinder is given by the following equivalence :
5 = πr2h
So , the volume of a 1 - column inch - diameter hole drilled 10 inch into a bat would be :
V = ( 3.14)(0.5 inches)(0.5 inches)(10 column inch ) = 7.85 three-dimensional in = 0.0045 cubic feet = 0.00013 cubic meters
Now we can calculate the volume of the bore - out Ellen Price Wood using the equality for density ( calciferol = m / V ) and looking up the denseness for snowy ash wood , which is 670 kilograms / three-dimensional meter [ source : SI Metric ] :
m = dv = ( 670 kilogram / cubic meter)(0.00013 cubic meters ) = 0.0871 kilo = 3.07 ounce
That means if you bore out Derek Jeter ’s bat , it would weigh about 29 ounce ( 822 gramme ) . Of course , you ’re fill the borehole , so you need to describe for the exercising weight of the phellem . Assuming the bobber occupies the same volume as the hole and deal the density of substantial bob to be 240 kilograms / cubic m , we can calculate the weight of the cork filler [ seed : SI Metric ] :
m = dv = ( 240 kilograms / cubic meter)(0.00013 cubic meter ) = 0.0312 kilograms = 1.1 ounces
So , a corked bat weighs about 2 ounces ( almost 57 Gram ) less than a regulation bat . For Derek Jeter , this would mean sway a 30 - troy ounce ( 850 - g ) squash racket alternatively of a 32 - apothecaries' ounce ( 907 - g ) one . Moreover , filling a wood bat with cork changes its pith ofgravity , shifting it closer to the hands of the batter . These two effects combine to make the marijuana cigarette easier to drop , which means a batter can get it around with more speed .
Does this really weigh ? It does , and we ’ll tell you why next .
Put a Cork in It (or Don’t Actually)
How far a batted nut travels depends on how tight it ’s move when it leaves the bat , a variable star known asbatted clump speed , orBBS . Increase BBS , and you increase how far a fly front chunk will travel . BBS itself depend on two agent : golf shot speed and the exercising weight of the bat . A corked bat results in eminent swing stop number , an effect that would tend to increase BBS . But at the same metre , such a bat weigh less , which means it transmit less office upon hit and leads to a decrease in BBS .
In 2011 , a team lead by Alan Nathan and Daniel Russell , two physicists who frequently canvas thescience behind baseball game , investigated just how these compete qualities of corked bats affect the velocity of bat clod . Their enquiry concentre on something cognize ascollision efficiency , orq , a value related to a bat ’s ability to grow an incoming pitch into a square hit . For an unmodified at-bat , the team found q to be about 0.214 . For a cork up bat , the economic value for q was 0.193 [ source : Nathan et al . ] . Next , they calculated batted ball amphetamine via the following equation :
BBS = ( q)(pitch velocity ) + ( 1 + q)(bat speed )
For an unmodified chiropteran , themathmight attend something like this :
BBS = ( 0.214)(94 miles per hour ) + ( 1.214)(70 mph ) = 20.116 mph + 84.98 miles per hour = 105 miles per hour
For a corked bat , it looks like this ( note that the 3 - miles per hour increase is an educated guesswork on our part ):
BBS = ( 0.193)(94 mph ) + ( 1.193)(73 mph ) = 18.142 mph + 87.089 mph = 105 mph
Notice that the batted ball speed is the same for both bat ! The inquiry suggests that the amplification associated with increase bat pep pill are negate by the loss associated with decreased bat weight . In other word , the net upshot of a corked bat is zero – it has no real wallop on the speed of bat ball and , as a resultant , how far they ’ll travel in the melodic line .
Unfortunately , this does n’t end the controversy , because cork bats probably have another reward . Agood hitterdoesn’t just get around a cork up bat faster . He can also swing the bat with neat acceleration , meaning he can move the chiropteran from 0 miles per hour to its top f number in a short amount of time . This allows him to wait longer on the tar , to see apitch betterand to make necessary adjustments in his swing . He may not hit more household run , but he ’ll make unanimous contact more regularly and likely have a dear batting norm .
Even in the face of scientific evidence , some hitters swear by their cork bats . It ’s quite possible that there ’s a placebo effect at study in such situations . After all , as any fan will enjoin you , baseball game is bring in the nous as much as it is on the force field .
