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.
But the draft has been on my mind lately, primarily because I recently read Michael Lewis' Moneyball. Lewis spends a big chunk of the book focusing on the Oakland A's draft strategy and Billy Beane's attempts to revolutionize it. Under Beane, the A's strategy is to rely more on performance and statistical analysis than traditional scouting methods, and to focus on college players over high-schoolers because their performance data is more reliable. The A's took college players with their first 24 picks last year, waiting until the 19th round before picking a high-schooler (readers of Moneyball will recall that the A's had seven first-round picks due to letting Jason Giambi, Jason Isringhausen, and Johnny Damon depart as free-agents).
Beane's tactics are a novel way to counteract the A's financial situation -- they can't afford to be wrong about those five-tool players who everybody else is chasing after, players who might turn out to be the next Roberto Clemente if they could only learn the strike zone. Hell, they can't afford the bonuses most of those five-tool players' agents are asking. So they go after players who have the one tool they can afford -- the abiltiy to hit. That's not to say Beane's strategy would work for every team, or that baseball would be as interesting a game if his methods were adopted. A team with more money can afford to take a risk on a high-school pitcher or a speedy, free-swinging outfielder with a gun for an arm, even if it only means using that player to bamboozle a wide-eyed GM out of some bullpen help at the trade deadline ("Mr. Bowden, Brian Cashman is on the line again...").
For most teams, the draft is still something of a crapshoot, even as high as the overall #1 pick. The historical record of number ones is a spotty one. Since the beginning of the draft in 1965, none of the players chosen first has gone onto induction in the Hall of Fame. Hell, some of them --1966 pick Steve Chilcutt (Mets), 1991 pick Brien Taylor (Yankees) -- never made the bigs. Others scarcely made a dent; does anybody remember Danny Goodwin ('71 and '75), Al Chambers ('79), or Shawn Abner ('84)? Many went on to be servicable but hardly star-spangled major-leaguers: Rick Monday ('65), Tim Foli ('68), Mike Ivie ('70), Bill Almon ('74), Shawon Dunston ('82), Tim Belcher ('83), B.J. Surhoff ('85). Well, Monday was kind of star-spangled, come to think of it.
One man has had some extraordinary success drafting first. Roger Jongewaard, Vice President of Scouting & Player Development for the Seattle Mariners, can lay claim to what more than likely will be the first overall #1s to reach the Hall of Fame in Ken Griffey, Jr. ('87) and Alex Rodriguez ('93). Prior to that dazzling duo, Jongewaard, while working for the Mets, made another #1 pick you might recognize: Darryl Strawberry (1980; he also drafted Billy Beane at #23 the same year). ESPN's Alan Schwartz has an interesting look at Jongewaard's career. Suffice it to say, he's not crying himself to sleep about having missed out on Mike Harkey and Darren Dreifort.
One thing is for sure: gone are the days when a team would draft a pitcher #1 and then rush him to the majors just for show. David Clyde, picked first by the Texas Rangers in 1973, lived that dizzying saga in a matter of a few weeks. Chosen ahead of Robin Yount and Dave Winfield, Clyde won his first start at the tender age of 18 years, two months and five days old (he beat Jim Kaat). The phenom stuck around the majors as much for his ability to draw crowds as for his pitching promise, but he went on to win only 17 more games in the bigs due to arm problems and mismanagement (those Rangers were a three-ring circus; see Mike Shropshire's hilarious, unsung classic Seasons in Hell for the details). Clyde was gone from the majors at 24, and done at 27. ESPN's Jeff Merron has a lengthy piece devoted to the Clyde saga (thanks to Adam Hardt for passing on the link).
I remember gleefully jeering the punk who provided the Dodgers with bulletin-board material before Game Two of the 1988 NLCS, then allowed five runs in the first two innings. Who knew the brash young punk doing the jeering would one day be calling him a favorite? In fact, if the tale is to be told properly, it was Cone who finally turned me towards being a Yankee fan.
In 1996, my second baseball season year in New York City, I read the sports pages daily, waiting for George Steinbrenner, his new manager Joe Torre, or one of the players to spark a controversy worthy of the Bronx Zoo's legacy, whereupon the team would implode. Remarkably, it never happened. I had no great affection for Cone at this point in his career, but his seven innings of no-hit ball in his post-aneurysm comeback on September 2 -- and his willingness to call it a day at that point -- exemplified these new Yankees: they had perspective. My Dodgers were still a factor in the National League at that point, but in my disgust with their meek showing down the stretch (a choke in the season's final week relegating them to the Wild Card, then a quick cha-cha-cha out of the postseason entirely), it seemed automatic to turn my attentions to the Bronx side. The rest, as they say, is history.
I revelled in Cone's finest moments as a Yankee, and empathized with him through his lowest. He was the voice of the team as far as I was concerned, and his honesty and accountability in the face of adversity, particularly in that miserable 2000 season, proved worthy of a role model. Even milking forty-five minutes of World Series postgame press conference out of a five-pitch outing, Cone was a treat to savor.
I'll be adding an entry for Cone to my Wall of Fame in due time, but I've already written about him on several occasions. What follows is a six-pack of links to some of my Cone-related pieces, all of them dating from after his career in pinstripes ended:
• My Yankees' replica jersey is a midnight-blue batting practice model adorned by Cone's number 36. I took quite a razzing one spring day in 2001 from a dimwitted bitch with a what-have-you-done-for-me-lately attitude towards Cone, then rehabbing in preparation to pitch for the Red Sox.
• Here's a piece about Cone as he kept the Red Sox afloat during the summer of 2001.
• Cone continued to pitch well for the Sox throughout that summer, but perhaps his finest moment of the season came on September 2, 2001 -- five years to the day since his the post-aneurysm game. As his replacement on the Yankees, Mike Mussina, came within one strike of a perfect game, Cone hung tough, holding the Yanks scoreless into the ninth inning before surrendering an RBI double to Enrique Wilson. I missed Cone's own perfect game, but this game, with its rich, multi-layered storylines, may have been even better. Possibly the best pitching duel I've ever seen.
• Through a complete fluke of post-September 11 rescheduling, I had tickets for Cal Ripken Jr.'s final game. Who should he be facing that night but David Cone. In what looked like it might stand as his own farewell to the major leagues, Cone threw eight innings of three-hit ball, allowing only one unearned run and resisting the easy temptation to groove one to Cal for old time's sake.
• Cone spent last season evaluating his options, dabbling in broadcasting while he waited for a phone call that never came.
• My Spring Training trip this past March took me to Port St. Lucie on the off chance that Cone might be pitching for the Mets that night as his comeback attempt continued. I got lucky.
But then again, we were all lucky to have David Cone.
Ruzich identifies 14 times since 1969 (when divisional play began) when the Cubs entered June either first or second in their division. In ten of those 14 Junes, the Cubs were below .500, and overall they went a combined187-214 (.466), leaving June either #1 or #2 in the division only six times. Only twice did they end up winning the division (1984 and 1989), and in 1998 they won the Wild Card slot in a one-game playoff.
Suffice it to say that June tends to weed out the pretending Cub teams from the contending ones. All of this is relevant because the Cubs are currently leading the NL Central by two games. Read Ruz's rundown of those ruinous Junes.
