Do corked bats allow baseball players to hit farther?
Porter Johnson, a physics professor at the Illinois Institute of Technology, explains. In professional baseball, the bat must be made from a single solid piece of wood thus the use of corked bats during games is illegal. 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. But the question of whether or not corked bats truly help hitters is a complex one. Suppose that you could make baseball bats of the same size, shape, structure, and strength, but with different weights. What would be the ideal weight for such a bat, so that a particular player could hit a given pitch farther than he could with a bat of different mass? And just how much difference does it make when the mass is changed? In fact, it is extremely difficult to calculate an ideal bat weight, which would surely vary from player to player as well as from pitch to pitch. It helps to
