Say it ain’t so
Everybody acknowledges there is a line. Where it is depends on where you’re standing. In baseball, you can steal a sign, if you are clever and patient, and if you make it to second base you can relay the sign somehow to your teammate at the plate, if he wants to know what’s coming (not everybody does). That’s gamesmanship, that’s fair. It’s on the other guys to protect their state secrets and intellectual property.
What you can’t do is get technology involved; cameras and monitors and geeks with spreadsheets. You can’t send the camera crew that produces content for your team website out on a pretextual errand and film a rival team’s coaching staff on the sideline at a game two weeks before you’re scheduled to play them so you can glean whatever you can from the footage.
You can rub out the back line of the batter’s box with your spikes and set up a few inches closer to the catcher. You can have performance-enhancing laser eye surgery and can spend your off-season in the gym, but there are quack-ish supplements you must avoid. Thou shalt not hollow out the barrel of your bat and fill it with cork or SuperBalls made of amazing Zectron unless you’re willing to be laughed at when your bat explodes or the glued-back cap comes off, exposing your folly.
And corking a bat is folly if you’re trying to achieve more power. When you lighten your bat you will be able to swing it faster but your bat will have less inertia, so a struck ball will leave your bat with no more velocity than it would with a heavier bat swung slightly slower. Real scientists have run experiments that confirm this. Their studies seem to indicate that, other things being equal, corked bats actually produce shorter fly balls than uncorked ones.
On the other hand, you will have more control over a lighter bat. And you would therefore be likely to make solid contact more often, and you might make safe hits. You might even hit more home runs with a lighter bat because you will feel more confident with it and therefore swing more aggressively. So maybe a player using a corked bat does have an unfair advantage: A corked bat is a lighter bat.
Other ways of getting a lighter bat include choking up like Matty Alou and selecting a bat that weighs 32 ounces as opposed to one that weighs 36 ounces. Both of these methods of bat lightening are legal.
A few years ago when I was playing some tournament golf there were some golf clubs you couldn’t use because their faces were too springy—what we called their “co-efficient of restitution” was too high. That meant if we low-handicappers used them, swinging as we did at upwards of 100 miles an hour, the golf ball might fly five or six yards further than it would ordinarily. Maybe.
That might not sound like much, especially if you are the sort of American humorist who immediately thinks how great it would be to have one’s golf ball fly five or six yards further into the rough or water hazard or out of bounds, but I can assure you there was a great temptation among my ilk to try out one of these “illegal” clubs. (Which weren’t illegal at all, you could get one back then as easily as you can pick up a Bushmaster AR-15 Semiautomatic rifle today.) I felt a lot more confident hitting an eight-iron than I did a seven-iron into a green, and as the irons got shorter my confidence improved exponentially. Hitting the ball five or six yards further would probably have cut at least a stroke or two a month off my game.
But everybody knew which models were United States Golf Association-conforming and which were not, so there wasn’t much danger of anyone using one to dominate the field during the club championship. In fact, one year, we all got together and decided to just ignore the fact that one old boy who couldn’t out-drive notorious short knocker Mike Bloomberg with the current POTUS tweeting at his back had, among the 30-odds clubs in his staff bag, a “firm”-shafted Callaway ERC II driver. We all figured Ol’ Tommy (not necessarily not his real name) wasn’t going to break 90 anyway, not even with the help of the two-inch graphite stick that was his most reliable weapon.
On the other hand, there are still places on the Internet where you can buy after-market versions of the most popular drivers on the PGA tour with their faces shaved down to non-conforming specs. And unlike a corked bat, the trampoline effect on these babies is real. For an extra $200 or so, you can get yourself a cheater club that looks and feels exactly like a conforming one (though it might be as much as 20 grams lighter). Short of sending the blunt instrument off to the crime lab, nobody would ever know.
And as far as that goes, I’m not at all sure that those China factories are all that precise anyway. Last time I tested drivers, I ended up hitting three “identical” models—at least the published specs were identical. But one felt different, livelier, hotter. That’s the one I took home. If somehow a hotter-than-permitted clubhead slipped through the quality control inspectors at the Fu Sheng factory in Zhongshan, well, that’s on the folks at TaylorMade.
Idon’t know that we all line-step, but I know I can read upside down handwriting about as well as I can read it properly oriented. I know that sometimes you write the nut graph of the concert review before you go to the show. I know that most games are won in the margins, that most people never stop to consider that a high end watch might be fake, and that Vermeer made use of camerae obscurae.
I am cynical enough to think that maybe the Houston Astros cheating scandal is, in a way, the best thing to happen to Major League Baseball in a decade or so, since the cheaters Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds got everyone excited about the dingers. I am cynical enough to think that in a world where we’ve been conditioned to see everything from Wall Street to the criminal justice system to the electoral apparatus as a rigged-up “reality” contest, that there’s no real shame attached to sign stealing. It’s only a fresh opportunity for outrage.
This isn’t 1919; we’re all Arnold Rothstein now.