Corking a bat is one way to do that?and it is prohibited by Major League Baseball. Generally a 6- to 8-inch hole is drilled in the top of the barrel, then filled with rubber or cork.

rodbac and I were discussing this in the NFL thread, but in the interest of preventing a derail, I'm starting it up here.The question: does corking a bat ...

Corking a baseball bat really may help a power hitter -- at least until he gets caught. Engineers at the University of Massachusetts Baseball Research Center in Lowell, Mass., recently put corked ...

Though a corked bat will travel at a greater velocity, the tail-off in weight lessens the mass. As a result, sluggers like Sosa will actually see the length of their moon shots decrease.

Greenberg said he corked bats for “a couple of” Expos players, too, after he started working for the Expos as a visiting clubhouse manager in 1995. He would not identify those players.

However, the lighter weight of a corked bat may allow hitters to get to pitches they might not otherwise hit with a standard bat. Between the limited evidence that corked bats provide any benefit ...

Mantle's children denied the claims in a statement released Monday. "Let us be clear: Dad didn’t need and never used a corked bat. Mickey Mantle was honest about the way he played the game that ...

Maybe corked by someone but not a direct link to him doing the corking," Wolter said.Rose, who was banned from baseball in 1989 for gambling on games, has denied rumors that he used corked bats to ...

The corked bat would soften the sting and protect your hands. I also used aluminum bats during batting practice, for the same reason. One day, I forgot to take the corked bats back to my clubhouse ...

Still, corked bats have turned up several times in major league play, most recently by Sammy Sosa. A definite advantage to this strategy is that lighter bats allow a quicker response by the batter.

Assuming the bat in question is one Mantle definitely used in games, it sure looks from the above photos like he corked in 1964. And though Mantle was trending downward by then, he was still ...