Here's Mickey Mantle holding his big, fat cheat-stick.
Here's Mickey Mantle holding his big, fat cheat-stick. Getty Images

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News: A corked Mickey Mantle bat is headed to auction.

Bigger news: Mickey Mantle corked his bat.

Indeed, Dan Good of the New York Post writes:

Grey Flannel Auctions is auctioning the Hillerich & Bradsby Co. bat, which was studied by PSA/DNA authenticator John Taube. Taube noticed alterations at the top of the bat’s barrel, and X-rays showed that the barrel had been drilled and filled with cork.

“This is the first corked bat of Mantle that we have seen or heard of,” Taube wrote in his report.

And here, courtesy of Grey Flannel Auctions, is the photographic evidence ...

We already knew that Mantle received a testosterone injection at least once in his career, and now we know that he put cork in his bat in the service of hitting the ball farther. Consider this the latest bit of evidence that players of baseball's "Golden Age" were limited not by an unwillingness to break the rules but rather by the mechanisms of rule-breaking available to them. Those uncomfortable gray areas get grayer by the day, it seems.

In any event, I imagine something yoked to Mantle's ever-notable name and tinged with controversy will fetch quite a bid. I look forward to righteous denunciations of Mantle's accomplishments all across Internet Land.

(Wink of CBS eye: Big League Stew)