SAMMY'S SIN.

Sammy Sosa, downcast and repentant, has finished serving his seven-day suspension from baseball for corking his bat, and is back in the middle of the Cubs' batting order, hoping for redemption and a few fat pitches down the line. Replays of his crime--an awkward swing against pitcher Jeremi Gonzalez in the first inning of a game at Wrigley Field against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays; the bat breaking and flying apart in front of the pitcher as the ball was fielded at second base and turned into an easy groundout; the incriminating smudge visible (in midair stop-time) on the pristine, riven wood above the handle--competed with Martha Stewart's bad-hair day on the late and early news, and provided a week's worth of opining and high-minding by the sports columnists and editorialists and call-in radio loonies and, surely, every Little League coach and dad between Tallahassee and Taiwan. Home-plate umpire Tim McClelland looked grave as he examined and then impounded the evidence, and the miserable Sosa, who had left the field, said that he had mistakenly carried a corked batting-practice bat up to the plate in real time. "I apologize to my team, to my fans," Sosa said. "I'll take the blame for it and move on." Major League Baseball, while officially confirming the presence of a foreign substance in the bottom half of the bat (the top chunk mysteriously disappeared from the Cubs' clubhouse before the game was done), X-rayed seventy-six more bats it had removed from Sosa's bin at Wrigley Field and found no corky DNA therein. The Hall of Fame also checked out the five Sosa bats in its archive and declared them pure. M.L.B. sentenced Sosa to an eight-game suspension, which Sammy appealed--this allowed him to play in a big weekend series at home against the Yankees--and he accepted a reduction to seven. Sosa's manager, Dusty Baker, said he hoped the furor "dies down and we can get back to baseball."

Well, yes, but who among us does not want this delicious malfeasance back again, at the breakfast table and in our imaginings, with its richly chewable mixture of speculation, cynicism, precedent, physics, and laughter? Baseball has had its share of dark days--the Black Sox, Pete Rose, and the players' strike of 1994 and '95 come to mind--but its recurring history of on-the-field chicanery has always held a raffish and comical charm. It's operetta. Think of Graig Nettles's bat flying in half during a 1974 Yankees game against the Tigers and spewing out six Superballs--a goof so ridiculous that he escaped fine and punishment altogether. Think of Albert Belle suffering a confiscation and suspension for corking in 1994--and his Indians teammate Jason Grimsley then crawling through an overhead air-conditioning duct to the umpires' room to retrieve the befouled lumber and replace it with a different bat. (He pulled off the Spider-Man caper but carelessly replaced the stick with one bearing another Indian's signature.)

The pitchers, given their range of opportunities to scuff, roughen, darken, or slime the ball and thereby cause it to imitate a Frisbee or a fruit bat or a diving cormorant as it approaches the plate, have not exactly lagged behind. Gaylord Perry, a Hall of Famer, always offered an imperturbable smile while he stood on the mound with outstretched arms as still another umpire vainly frisked his ...