Robert Adair is a physics professor from Yale University, the same institution that Bart Giamatti presided over. He wrote a book called the Physics of Baseball, 2d ed. Harper Perennial, 1994.

It is said that Giamatti & MLB commissioned him to do a study on corked bats. He doesn’t acknowledge that in the book; but it may be true, given the institutional commonality of Bart and the Professor.

In the section “Aberrant Bats, Corked Bats”, at p. 130, Adair recites that: “On occasion, players have modified their wooden bats by drilling an axial hole in the end of the bat and filling it with elements such as cork….They place a wooden cap over the hole, and sand and varnish it to hide the modification. Neither the hole nor the addition of the filling are allowed under official baseball rules.”

He explored whether such an illegal bat might create properties that would be outside those of a legal bat.

Corking “does sensibly change the bat. The weight is reduced by about 1.5 ounces….If a player is having trouble getting around on the fast ball, this weight reduction will help him in very much the same way that a lighter bat5 might help: the batter will probably not drive the fast ball as far by 2 or 3 feet when he hits it well with the drilled-out bat, but he may hit it with good timing more often.”

It seems from Adair’s findings that Sosa's corked bat was more of a slump breaking tool to achieve better timing than to hit the ball longer/farther. Given the fact that Sosa’s 76 other bats were clean, and that his excuse was improbable, he may have chosen the corked bat to reinvigorate his hitting, which has been mediocre this season by his standards. Getting around on the fast ball is a geriatric phenomenon, not a physics one.