Shyzer.com

[EDIT]

It hurts, it really does. Damn you genes! Why couldn’t you have blessed me like that?!
[/EDIT]

Did anybody see the clip where President Bush was adressing reporters this past weekend while sitting next to French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac? They were both sitting there, and while Bush spoke to the reporters, Chirac had an interpreter standing next to him telling him what Bush was saying. Bush gets to the point in his little speech where he says “I know there’s a lot of people in both our countries wondering if we can actually sit down and have a comfortable conversation and the answer is absolutely. We can have disagreements but that doesn’t mean we have to be disagreeable to each other.” RIGHT AFTER Chirac’s interpreter finishes talking, Chirac starts laughing!

Priceless my friends, priceless.

And finally, I’ve got to talk about something that is really starting to piss me off. I am sick of almost every baseball writer out there saying that Sammy Sosa is now a tainted player - a player whose past achievements should now be questioned as to whether or not they were obtained through “credible” means. All this does is show how most writers are out there looking to stir up trouble. Before you consider whether or not to believe Sammy’s explaination that he accidentally used a batting practice bat in which he had it corked just to hit the ball further for the fans, you need to look at the actual facts.

1) None of Sosa’s other bats were corked.

After being ejected, major league umpires are required to go and confiscate all bats owned by the player. Sosa stayed in the dugout, never once entering the locker room and therefore he never had the chance to even go switch his bats up if in fact he did have corked bats. All 77 of Sosa’s bats were examined today and not a single one had been tampered with.

2) The cork plug was BLACK!

When you cork a bat, you have to drill a hole in the bat and then plug the hole with wood so that the cork stays inside the bat. When using a brown wooden bat, you use brown wood so that by first glance, you can’t tell the bat was drilled. However, Sosa’s plug was JET BLACK which he explained as one of the prevention measures he had put in place so that he didn’t accidentally grab that bat. When you see a brown bat with a huge black spot in the middle of it, it’s pretty easy to tell it was tampered with.

3) Sosa didn’t try to grab the bat pieces.

Had Sosa known he was using a corked bat, he would never have dropped his bat when it broke. It is not unusual for players to just job down to first holding their broken bat piece when they groundout and then scooping up the other piece on their way back to the bullpen. This way, the umpires never have to see your bat and therefore, Sosa wouldn’t have been caught. However, we can easily see that Sosa had no guilty mind due to the fact that he dropped his bat the instance he hit the ball and sprinted to first and THEN never even attempting to intervine when the umpires went to collect the bat pieces.

4) Have you ever seen Sosa’s homeruns?

This is a guy who hits balls out of the park. And I mean literally over the walls of the ballpark. He hits moon shots, not little dips that barely make it over. It makes no sense for him to cork his bat. In fact, a corked bat generates only about 2 MPH more in bat speed, meaning that if a regular bat would hit it 400 ft, a corked bat would hit it 408 ft. This is the type of difference that scrawny shortstops who only hit 1 or 2 homers a year need, not Sosa who easily hits the ball 500+ ft, which would easily clear any major league park.

Frankly, I could go on and on about how it makes absolutely no sense for Sosa to cork his bat. And anybody who has ever talked to Sosa would know that he is an intelligent man. I’m just sick and tired of people making him out to be some type of intentionally cheating player who should never be looked at the same again. This guy is one of the greatest players in the game and has shown time and time again that he cares about the fans and the history of the game. Right after yesterday’s game ended, Sosa didn’t run and hide but instead held hours worth of news conferences to try and explained what happened. You have no idea how pissed off these writers are making me.