The Cleveland Indians are suggesting that they might not have been the only ones snooping around Chicago's Comiskey Park looking for Albert Belle's bat over the weekend.
The Indians have admitted to breaking into the umpires' dressing room in a clumsy attempt to replace Belle's corked bat with a legal model during Friday night's game against the White Sox. But some of them are also wondering how the White Sox came upon the information that Belle's bat was doctored.Perhaps, Cleveland pitcher Dennis Martinez said, Chicago had its own spies lurking about.
"I think the White Sox were trespassing in our locker room," Martinez said. "Since it's their home park, there's nothing to stop them when we're not there. It just seemed too obvious."
On Friday night, Chicago manager Gene Lamont demanded that umpire Dave Phillips inspect the bat used by Belle, who had homered the night before. League rules permit a manager to request an inspection of one opponent's bat per game.
Phillips said he initially saw nothing wrong with Belle's bat, but he confiscated it and locked it up in the umpires' room so it could be examined more closely later.
The plot thickened. Someone - the Indians won't say who - broke in during the game, dropping down through the ceiling, and switched bats. But Phillips wasn't fooled, and the Indians eventually returned the original bat to American League officials, blaming the switch on an overzealous member of their organization.
Indians general manager John Hart would not comment on a Chicago newspaper's report that the team had tried to give league representatives yet another phony bat - which the league rejected because it did not match photos of the bat Phillips had seized - before finally turning over the one Belle had attempted to use.
When the league X-rayed and dissected Belle's bat Monday, cork was discovered inside. Corking, which is not permitted, can make a bat lighter, easier to swing and more resilient.
Belle was suspended for 10 days but will remain in Cleveland's lineup until AL president Bobby Brown hears his appeal July 29 in New York. Belle homered and tripled in the Indians' 12-3 victory over Texas on Tuesday night.
Lamont has said he decided to have the bat inspected because he had "heard some things" and because of some things the White Sox staff had noticed about the way Belle was hitting.
Indians manager Mike Hargrove did not accuse the White Sox of poking around where they didn't belong, but he hinted he might have some questions about how they found out.
"It was a little curious, yeah," Hargrove said. "Beyond that, I don't want to comment.
"Gene was just doing his job. Put in the same situation, if we had suspicions, we'd do the same thing. We did it with (Chicago pitcher) Dennis Cook. We suspected him of putting pine tar on the ball to give himself a better grip. We had it checked, and it turned out that he didn't. There was no vindictiveness in it, no revenge in it. It was just part of the game."
Hargrove would not speculate on how widespread the use of corked bats might be in baseball. He said he did not know Belle used a corked bat.
"I could sit here and throw out accusations, and that's all they'd be," Hargrove said. "I don't have any facts to back anything up."
The last player disciplined for using a corked bat was Houston's Billy Hatcher, suspended for 10 days in 1987.
Belle has denied using a corked bat. His agent, Arn Tellem, issued a statement saying the accusation was "no more than a well-timed charge concocted by the White Sox in the heat of a pennant race with Cleveland."
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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION
Corking a bat
A player can hit a baseball farther using a bat filled with cork rather than an all-wood model. How and why it is done:
- A 12-inch-deep hole is drilled in the meat end of the bat.
- The diameter of the hole ranges from that of a pencil to as wide as a dime.
- The cork or any light material, including plastic foam or ground-up rubber balls, is stuffed in the cavity.
The inside scoop
* A corked bat is, on average, two ounces lighter than an all-wood bat, enabling a player to swing the bat faster.
* A corked bat could improve the length of the hit slightly, by about 10 feet.
* Cork dampens the sound a hollow cavity would produce when hitting a baseball.