Archive for the ‘Cubs’ tag
Familiar Rivalry
This piece was originally published at the Lovable Losers Literary Revue.
I’VE LIVED IN CHICAGO FOR NINE YEARS, but I’m a lifelong Cardinals fan. I grew up in southwestern Indiana, just a two-hour drive on I-64 across the flat, oil rig-dotted wastelands of southern Illinois to St. Louis. On summer nights, Jack Buck and Mike Shannon lulled me to sleep with their baritone calls of Cardinals games on the local radio affiliate. My town was split about 70-30, Cardinals to Cubs fans, and my best friend across the street was a Cubbie diehard. We spent muggy July afternoons playing out the rivalry in his backyard: Ozzie Smith and Willie McGee versus Ryne Sandberg and Jody Davis. Grown ups told us that Cardinals and Cubs fans weren’t supposed to like each other, but that was hard to believe. For us, it was more like a matter of taste: Coke versus Pepsi or grape versus orange, just a convenient way to divvy up the teams for pickup games.
When I went to college at Indiana University in Bloomington, I was in the minority for the first time. I met kids from the Chicago suburbs, northwest Indiana, Indianapolis, South Bend, Fort Wayne, and they all liked the Cubs. Cardinal fans popped up here and there, but for the most part, I spent my time with the Cubs diaspora, created by the universal reach of WGN.
The Physics of Corking a Bat
On June 3, 2003, Chicago Cubs slugger Sammy Sosa stepped to the plate in the first inning of a game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. With runners on second and third, Sosa chopped a grounder to second, shattering his bat in the process. Umpire Tim McClelland examined the pieces of the broken bat, and to the surprise of the sports world, discovered that it was corked. Sosa was ejected, and thus began a most embarrassing episode in his career.
Corking a bat, or illegally doctoring it by drilling a hole in the barrel and filling it with cork or pieces of rubber, is believed to help players hit the ball farther. Baseball lore says that hollowing out the wooden barrel and replacing it with lighter material allows the player to swing it faster and hit the ball harder. This alteration also supposedly makes the bat springier, catapulting the ball off the bat and sending it an extra 10-20 feet. In a game often decided by a fraction of an inch, this could mean the difference between a sacrifice fly and a three-run homer.