Chicago Cubs: Remembering the Sammy Sosa Corked Bat Game

Chicago Cubs: So which one was it?

MLB launched an investigation and found that the other bats in his possession hadn’t been corked; this was an isolated incident. Chicago Tribune reporter Paul Sullivan reports the Cubs got a 10-minute warning before the investigators were allowed in the locker room to look at Sosa’s bats. Hence, as Sullivan puts it, there was “ample opportunity to hide any evidence.”

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Seventeen years later, there are a lot of people who don’t believe Sammy when he said it was all an accident. If he had played again at Wrigley after the team traded him away, it would have probably made our awkward reunion lists.

Throughout their history, oddities have riddled this Cubs franchise. Sosa’s corked bat incident is right up there among the oddest of them all.

From the corked bat incident to performance-enhancing drug allegations, many will always want to put an asterisk next to Sosa’s 609 career home runs (ninth-most of all time).

Shunned by the team he made a name for himself with, and mostly out of the public spotlight at least in the United States (an excellent 2018 Sports Illustrated article details his new life in Dubai), we’ll probably never know for sure if the corked-bat incident was intentional or an accident like he claimed and MLB concluded.

The pitch that cracked his corked bat was out of the zone, so he could have saved himself a lot of trouble by just taking a walk. If he had done this and the whole PED thing didn’t happen either, then the Cubs would have probably retired his number by now.

Gotta’ love revisionist history.