Caltrops - NFL2K3 - Re: short baseball article

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by OGF 07/24/2003, 10:44am PDT

In my experience it did help. As a pitcher in the minor leagues we didn't hit during games. They had the DH for good reasons in the minors. That didn't keep us from ordering bats, or from corking those same bats. We actually used ground superballs, instead of cork. Some people think the corking of a bat doesn't help. They say its the process of drilling the bat. Taking the weight out of the bat to cork it. Makes the bat lighter and easier to whip. This improves your bat speed(That's what works.) Lot's of people believe the whole corking thing is worthless, and it's all in guys head. I think it works. For whatever reason, I found corking my bat made me hit it farther. Most ballplayers feel the same. They don't care why it works.

I don't think you could find a guy in the majors who hasn't used a cork bat. Once in batting practice to see what its all about. They will tell you they felt and saw the difference. Most position players end up borrowing those bats from pitchers. Pitcher always have a shit-load of loaded bats. Corking isn't really a problem in baseball. It's just to much of a risk to use. No one wants to have a loaded bat break. There are other better ways to cheat.

I don't believe Sosa's explanation. Especially after Mark Grace chimed in. That was classic. Once he said he didn't buy it. I knew. Sosa probably used it to try and get out of a slump. Most people I know didn't get why he did such a shitty job corking it. Also didn't understand why he didn't borrow a pitchers corky.

I got to take batting pracitce infrequently in the minors. You never knew when due to switches and injuries, one of the pitchers would have to hit. So they gave us the old token run. We were always last to hit. Sometimes we didn't get to hit at all. It just depended on what the practice schedule was. So when they let us take batting practice, we(the pitchers) would then go full on home run derby mode. All of us would try to do nothing but hit it out. It would turn into a huge rag session. Plus we had money and booze on it. As such guys were ordering grosses and just doctoring the shit out of the bats. Anything to win the derby, get the bragging rights.

It didn't happen often, but occasionally a pitcher would get to bat in a real game. I actually got to bat once. Walked on 4 straight pitches.
No one was more suprised then I was. Man did the guys on the team hate that. Only thing worse then me getting on base that easily, would have been to get a hit. No one would have heard the end of it. You could literally hear the groan from the dugout as I ran down to first base. They knew I was going to chirp and chirp about my 4 pitch for months.