[Springtime_for_Hunter]

Sigh. Again they ignore the secondary effects entirely. Yes, corking isn't going to increase the force imparted to the ball in a collision. That's hardly unintuitive, given F=ma and a fairly consistent elasticity. But, increased "bat speed" does give two secondary effects:

1: The batter may be more likely to make "solid contact" as "bat speed" increases (this is the conventional wisdom, anyway, and I can personally attest that very low "bat speed" makes it darn hard to hit.). Obviously, if the batter hits the ball better, it's going to go farther.

2: A ball struck with higher "bat speed" is more likely to be pulled. Since the fences are shorter towards the foul poles, this would result in more balls becoming home runs, despite traveling the same distance.

Basically, while an equal collision will generate approximately equal results, there's no evidence that a batter using a corked bat and one using an uncorked bat will have equal collisions. If a batter who is corking is hitting the ball better -- regardless of how far it flies -- it's an advantage. While bat speed and mass are equivalently important in determining where the ball will go as the result of a collision, they are not of equal importance when it comes to the skill of creating a favorable collision.

Sorry for being off-topic here, but this psuedo-physics has been annoying me for a while, and I took the opportunity to vent.