One of the few innovations to the design of the wooden bat is cutting a "cup" out of the end of a bat. Developed by a pro player named Jose Cardinal in 1972, this "cup" can't be more than 2 inches in width, and 1 inch deep. According to Bradley, the cupped bat allows the bat maker to use a heavier, denser, stronger timber, while still maintaining the desirable bat weight. "Recently," says Bradley, "Ted Williams came to visit, and he said that if he was playing today, all of his bats would be cupped. Coming from one of the great hitters of all time, that's good enough for me!" About half the pro bats made by H&B today are cupped bats.

Throughout the history of baseball, players in search of an edge have doctored, or altered, bats in many unusual ways. The main strategy has been "corking" the bat.

"Players cut the end of the bat off, drill a hole down into the barrel of the bat, and fill the hole with cork, then glue the end back on. This is an attempt to lighten the bat, and give it more spring or bounce," says Bradley." But really this does nothing advantageous to the bat. In fact, the bat gets weaker, because you've drilled out the heart of it. You may remember the time when [pro player] Graig Nettles put a bunch of rubber superballs inside his bat, and the bat broke, and all the balls spilled out." Bradley attributes the persistence of corking more to head games between the players than to any advantage a corked bat might have.

Players have also been known to rub their bats with ham bones or glass bottles, a process called "boning," in an attempt to harden the bat. However, this practice doesn't seem to produce any benefit beyond the psychological either. In early days, some hitters would illegally hamme nails into their bats so that the ball would strike "iron." Even if the bat could be made harder, it would only diminish hitting, according to H&B Vice President of Technical Services George Manning. "Solid wood bats "give" very little in the impact area, and thus they store very little energy. What little they do store, they give back [to the ball] very efficiently. On the other hand, the ball distorts a lot under impact, and is relatively inefficient in giving the energy back," Manning notes.So a harder bat just results in more deformation of the ball, and a lesser hit. The question that come to us next was, but what about a metal bat?

© Exploratorium