[ARETE] Review of Corked

[Duncan Jamieson]

All,
Please find below and attached Dave Buchanan's review of Brian J.
Love's *Corked.
*It will give you a respite from reading final exams/papers, some of which
*might* be corked.
Duncan

Love, Brian J and Michael L. Burns. *Corked: Tales of Advantage in
Competitive Sports*. (Fifth Avenue, 2019).



Reviewed by Dave Buchanan, MacEwan University



*Corked* consists of 26 ten-page chapters of about 10 pages, each profiling
a story of what the authors, Brian J. Love and Michael L. Burns, call
“advantage” in competitive sports--bending or breaking the rules in order
to get an edge. The diversity of sports the book considers is impressive,
running from the mainstream (baseball, basketball, hockey, football) to
what many North American sports fans would probably consider the marginal
(jai alai, cricket, sailing, curling). In the preface, the authors say the
intent of the book is to entertain and provoke thought. And for a certain
kind of sports nerd, many of the stories here will do just that.



The timing of this book is fortuitous. The recent sign-stealing scandal in
Major League Baseball has brought unprecedented attention to the question
of what’s technically and ethically allowable when it comes to gaining an
advantage in a sports competition. Before the pandemic came along, the
cloud of controversy swirling around the Houston Astros seemed poised to be
a major story of the 2020 MLB season.



The book’s authors are academics with a passion for sports and an interest
in number crunching and sports trivia. Most of the claims about advantage
are supported by analytics of some kind. But the research is mostly on the
light side, with a couple of exceptions (if you’re into formulas for
determining the mass advantage of a corked bat, you’ll get your fix in the
title chapter). For the most part, though, the authors keep the tone
accessible and the data between the lines of the charts.



The stories of advantage here generally fall into three categories: certain
playing surfaces or the manipulation thereof (baseball, tennis, hockey);
equipment--as in doctoring the equipment of the sport (air pressure of a
football, the surface of a baseball, or construction of a bat) or coming up
with a technological innovation that the rules of a sport have not
anticipated (skinsuits in swimming, hi-tech curling brushes); and home
field advantage.



My favorite chapters, by far, involved the first two categories, especially
the ones involving baseball. This may be due, in part, to my personal
fondness for that sport but it’s also true, I think, that baseball has one
of the richest traditions when it comes to ingenious ways to eke out any
kind of advantage at all (think of those garbage can signals from the
Astros dugout). I loved the story of how the groundskeepers at Candlestick
Park helped the Giants neutralize base-stealing whiz Maury Wills during the
1962 season; or the tales of pitchers doctoring baseballs with foreign
objects or substances; even the chapter about how certain ballparks still
find ways to manipulate the Batter’s Eye, the blacked out area in
centrefield behind the pitcher.



As much as I enjoyed some parts of this book, I found that others didn’t
quite fit under the larger heading of “advantage.” The chapter on jai alai,
for instance, seems more interested in explaining the fascinating origins,
rules, and evolution of this fringe sport. This penchant for interesting
trivia sometimes overshadows the “advantage” focus of the book. While the
tradition of tossing octopi onto the ice during Detroit Red Wings games
makes for a wonderfully bizarre story, I don’t know that it has much to do
with “advantage.”



Some other chapters feel kind of obvious. The cycling one, for instance,
focusing on its well documented doping problems and the one about employing
the shift in baseball fielding are kind of old news for most sports fans.
And the home-field ones, in particular, I found less interesting. Every fan
knows about this particular “advantage.” It’s kind of common sense and not
really something that teams or players can control.



But if the authors wanted to do a follow up book, I’d suggest one on just
baseball. When I was a kid playing wiffle ball in my driveway, we’d not
only pretend we were our heroes, Nolan Ryan and Reggie Jackson; we’d also
pretend to cheat--stashing a dab of Vaseline under our cap brims a la
Gaylord Perry--or even react to a faux accusation of cheating (pantomiming
George Brett’s pine-tar freak out) because we thought it was funny and, on
some level, we knew that it was an actual, storied, if unsanctioned, part
of the game. I’m not sure you could say the same of any other mainstream
sport.



So, Corked 2: The Garbage Can Chronicles? The timing is right for it.



Remember to smell the roses as you recumber past

Duncan R. Jamieson, Ph. D.
Professor of History
Book Review Editor
*AETHLON: The Journal of Sport Literature*
Ashland University
Ashland, OH  44805
USA
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