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Message #3516 of 6634  *NEW*
To:  All
From:  
Reedster  
Subject:  BaseballGeeks PodCast #20, fresh, exciting, and new
Date:  5/20/06, 11:38pm
This Week in Geek: Bonds and 714, injuries, the falling Yanks, players coming back from injury, and more; hot and cold hitters and pitchers from Week 7; fantasy forecast with 2 start pitchers and hitters and pitchers park analysis; False Rumors

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Message #3566 of 6634  *NEW*
To:  Reedster
From:  
Reedster  
Subject:  Correction on podcast
Date:  5/26/06, 9:05am
Regarding the corked bat discussion in softball, during our False Rumors segment, I got a response from Boogaman that I thought was interesting... and, as I made a mistake, deserving of the correction. Read on...

It is amazing what people will do to win a game in a rec league.

I just listened to the podcast. Thanks for the shoutout. You guys were
mentioning corked aluminum bats and that is inaccurate. What they do is
remove the endcaps on the aluminum bats and machine the inner walls making
the aluminum thinner which increases the trampoline, rebound effect. The
bats are manufactored to strict tolerances to be legal for the association
(ASA,ISA, USSSA, NSA) standards. The cheating happens when the bats are
post-manufacture machined to exceed the tolerances mandated by the
regulating associations. Shaving the inside of the bat typically alters
the weight of the bat. I have also heard that the weighting in the bat
may be altered to compensate or for preference giving the bat an endload
or vice versa.

The other popular mode of altering bats is to paint an illegal bat to
appear as a legal bat. This has been done with some Miken brand bats as
the original Miken was extremely hot. After numerous injuries the
regulating associations determined that those bats were too hoot for the
field dimensions and the risk of injury to participants was too great to
allow these bats to be used under association play. An underground
industry developed to paint these bats and add decals to make them look
identical to the legal bats that replaced them.

Several years back titanium bats were manufactured. These bats sold for
about $500-$600. They were too hot and were immediately banned. It has
been popular to paint these bats to look like legal bats. The problem
with the titanium is it has a distinct sound. This problem was solved by
adding cotton inside the bat to dampen the sound. This could alter the
weight of the bat by several ounces.

Corking does not work with aluminum. I had a bat that we filled with
racket balls a while back and tried it out in practice. The balls added
way to much weight to the bats to be of any advantage. If anything they
hampered performance of the bat too but the bat's weighting was
significantly impaired. I would say that any myth of adding tennis balls
to the inside of a bat is untrue.

If you go into a bat shop or a sporting goods store and try out the feel
of a bat, ask to try out a bat sleeve. These sleeves are very light but
by sliding them over the bat the centrifugal force on the bat makes it
feel like a heavy weight has been added to the bat.

Thought I'd throw out some food for thought. As I said earlier, I have
had word that some of this has spread beyond recreational ball.

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