[spark240]

Originally Posted by Jason Moyer

Found online, essentially similar to what has been printed in various books:

From The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, pg 784 :
" in 1983 a travelling Hillerich and Bradsby exhibit featured a Babe Ruth bat. According to Dan Gutman in In Ain't Cheatin' If you Don't Get Caught, the Seattle players were admiring the bat "when Dave Henderson noticed that the round end of the bat didn't exactly match the wood of the barrel. The end was cracked, but the rest of the bat was not.
" 'That's a plug!' said Henderson. 'This bat is corked'"
... As I see it nothing could be more typical of Ruth than to use a corked bat if he could get by with it. Ruth tested the limits of the rules constantly; this is what made him who he was."

I own the book, and didn't remember reading this. But okay, so Henderson basically seems to be making a joke. It seems that nobody tried to actually determine if what looked like a plug actually was, or if there was anything but wood inside. (I don't know if there's x-ray type technology which would be able to say definitively whether the bat is solid wood, but I suspect there is; I am not proposing sawing into an artifact like this.) Then James makes a supposition about what Ruth might have done.

Originally Posted by Jason Moyer

Same book pg 686 notes that the American league issued a policy prohibiting "trick bats" in 1923 after the Babe was caught using one.

Unfortunately I don't have the book handy, so I'm not sure what James says about the "policy," but the bat Ruth was found to be using in that case was the laminated one I mentioned earlier; that is, it was entirely composed of wood, just not one single solid piece of wood. The rule he was in violation dated to 1893. Bill Curran of thediamondangle.com characterizes the "policy" as a "reminder," which I think is more appropriate. (Interestingly, laminated bats were later allowed, sort of, after '27 and before '39, and then again since '54, provided that all the pieces of laminate are the same type of wood and the particular bat is approved by the rules committee. I'm not aware of anyone in recent times who takes advantage of this, or why they would want to.) Curran also mentions that, "Ruth and his laminated bat felt Johnson's wrath in part because at about the same time the Browns' Ken Williams was caught with what appeared to be a corked bat."

To sum up, Bill James may well be right about Ruth's character, but I don't see that we know that (a) Ruth ever used a corked bat, or (b) any nonstandard bat Ruth did use had anything to do with a rule change.