[PakG1]

If we accept lighter baseballs as a way to get more home runs, what's wrong with corked bats or any other mechanical mechanisms that could be used to juice home runs? Sammy Sosa was suspended 8 games for using a corked bat, which was claimed was supposed to only be for practice and was used accidentally.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corked_bat#History_of_use_in_M...

I suppose like any other sport, baseball is picky and arbitrary about what's OK and what's not OK when it comes to changing equipment and standards.

[milesvp]

I once read an article about the 'sport' of speedwalking that drove this point home to me. This is a sport, where pretty much the only rule is that one foot must always be touching the ground at all times. But in the age of video, it's pretty clear that this one rule is violated by every speedwalker every race. But the ruling body of the sport didn't care about any of the video evidence, and doubled down on using judges with a set of criterium to determine if walkers had both feet in the air.

My other takeaway was that if your sport can't enforce it's only major rule, because physics, they'll find ways to lie to themselves to maintain the status quo. It's probably a profound lesson in politics if I really think about it.

[trgv]

The difference is that - in theory anyway - all of the balls are the same.