Baseball players cheat ineffectively.

Not surprisingly, it turns out that illegally modifying a baseball bat by hollowing out part of the core and introducing a foreign substance such as cork may not actually help you hit a baseball farther!  As it turns out, corking a bat reduces its “collision efficiency” (whatever that is) and actually tends to make the ball travel less far when struck.

Unless you’re Bucky Dent?  The article is ludicrously unclear on its conclusions, because it includes such horrendous sentence construction as this:  “Who can watch a pitch slightly longer before swinging, make up for the lost time with a faster swing and achieve more solid contact more often.”  I don’t know, Scientific American, who can watch a pitch slightly longer?  The answer appears to “contact hitters”, as that sentence comes right after this one: “But the researchers note that, ironically, a corked bat might result in more homers from non-homer hitters.”  So it looks like some over-zealous editor took out a comma and replaced it with a period.  Never mind that the resulting sentence is nearly impossible to parse correctly.  Anywhooty, the gist of the thing seems to be that corking your bat doesn’t work.  Except when it does.

My favorite part of the article is that it claims that hitters cork their bat in order to make them lighter, to achieve higher bat speed.  Well, sure, that’s what they say NOW.  But that’s only because the old reason they used to cork their bats was proven to be silly long ago.  Back in the day, when Graig Nettles was sticking super balls in his bat, they thought that the foreign substance inside the core of the bat actually added spring to it–in short they thought it did exactly what it doesn’t do, namely increase the “collision efficiency” of the bat.  That little bit of nonsense was disproved years ago, and so everybody switched to the idea that a corked bat is lighter, and thus increases swing speed, which results in more homers.  The truth is, baseball players cork their bats because they’re  illogical, superstitious nimrods who will cling to this bit of garbage forever, no matter how many times it’s shown that they are actually putting themselves at a disadvantage by corking their bats.

Except for Bucky Dent.  He can still cork his bat.  Seriously Sci-Am?  You couldn’t come up with a better, perhaps more recent example of a no-power slap hitter?  You had to go Bucky Fucking Dent on me?  Screw you you goddamn Yankees fans.