To cut to the chase: there is now irrefutable evidence that Pete Rose, Major League Baseball’s all-time hit leader who is currently banned from the game for betting on baseball, used a corked bat. How often he used it, how many other bats were similarly doctored, and what results he got from the illegal bat (s) are all unknown, and probably unknowable. The long, interesting and well-researched article about Rose’s bat on the website “Deadspin” points out that:

• Corked bats (which have been doctored with a hollow chamber that is filled with cork, on the theory that it lightens the bat without sacrificing power) are forbidden by the rules of baseball, and their use constitutes cheating.

• Their use is almost impossible to detect; only a handful of players have ever been caught using one, but it is believed that the cheaters are many and notable. Amos Otis, a star for the Kansas City Royals, admitted after he retired that his bats were corked for the majority of his career. Norm Cash, who won a shocking batting championship in 1961 with an average far above any he posted before or after, attributed his career year to a corked bat.

• It is quite possible that corked bats don’t have any positive effect at all, and might even be worse than regular bats.

The last point cuts no ice with me. Baseball has seen fit to ban corked bats as illegal equipment, and using them surreptitiously, which is the only way they can be used, is cheating whether it actually improves a batter’s performance or not. A card cheat who draws an ace from his shoe and still loses the hand is no more ethical than the cheat who does the same and wins the pot. The argument that ineffective cheating somehow lessens the offense, which I have encountered frequently, is consequentialism at its silliest, in which an act intended to produce an unethical result is considered purified by its incompetence. The act is the same, whether it works or not.

The challenge posed by baseball blogger/lawyer Craig Calcatarra is an intriguing one: Would this be sufficient to justify not voting for Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame if Hell froze over and his permanent ban from the game was lifted? Wily Craig is actually asking several questions in one, which I will address individually:

1. Would possession of a corked bat by itself disqualify an otherwise fully-qualified player, like Pete Rose, for the Hall of Fame? Clearly not, especially in the absence of any evidence regarding how often it was used. In the Hardball Times 2010 Annual, I wrote an article that attempted to assess how the Hall of Fame should measure a player’s good character and sportsmanship (this is part of the stated criteria), and concluded that single or limited instances of on-field cheating, like throwing a spitball or using a corked bat should not disqualify a player for the honor, but could tip the scales in a borderline case.
2. Should legitimate and well-founded suspicion that a player like Rose used a corked bat through a significant portion of his career knock him out of Hall consideration? I would think so. If the “legitimate and well-founded suspicion” rose to the level of, for example, existing suspicions regarding Barry Bonds’ steroid use, and voters reasonably concluded that, in Rose’s case, the all-time career hit leader was routinely cheating, they would be justified in concluding that he didn’t meet minimal standards of good character and sportsmanship. The issue, I think,  is whether we are talking about the distinction between an outstanding player who cheated on rare occasions, or a player who was, at his core, a cheater.
3. Would the corked bat keep Pete Rose out of the Hall of Fame if somehow the lifetime ban for gambling was lifted? No, Rose would be kept out by the combination of his off-field sin of gambling on baseball and lying about it, combined with his on-field transgression of cheating with a corked bat an indeterminate number of times and lying about that (as documented in the Deadspin piece), plus his post-career conviction for tax fraud. The bat by itself isn’t enough to deprive a superstar like Rose of enshrinement, but it puts him squarely in the category of a dishonest, untrustworthy player who cannot be called a credit to his sport—if he wasn’t already in that category.

The best argument for letting Pete Rose into the Hall of Fame despite gambling on baseball as a manager was that on the field as a player, he played hard, fair, and spectacularly. The corked bat destroys that argument, and reaffirms a principle of human nature and ethics that people like to deny. People who are dishonest and unethical in one aspect of their life are very likely to be dishonest and unethical in the other aspects as well.