Anyone have Wall Street Journal access? Looking for a copy of an article they have on there called "Softball, Hard Questions" from today's edition.

I don't have on line access but I found a copy of the print version. I will summarize the contents.

Various on-line entities advertise that they will modify legal bats to make them illegal and thus able to hit the ball up to 55 feet farther. The do this by various methods. Th most common is taking off the end cap and filing away some weight from the inside of the bat. This procedure requires machine shop tools and some professional expertise.

These inidviduals are called bat doctors and the most common quoted price for their services was $80-100 per bat. Other techniques involved playing around with the weight inside the bat to shift it and make a bigger sweet spot. Still other bat doctors would take a blatantly illegal bat and repaint it with a legal manufacturer's logo.

A significant part of the article was devoted to what umpires attempt to do to trip up the doctors. Bottom line was that the umpires are fighting a losing battle. The fakes are too good. The legal bat manufacturers are having a little more success. They have sent cease and desist orders orders to all of the bat doctors that they can identify and are attempting to make their bats insides more difficult to access. That leaves the illegal manufacturers as the sole supplier of illegal bats. They sell bats with no markings and the bat artists that do the repainting have an open field.

Perhaps the most extreme method of detection of illegal bats mentioned in the article is a $2500 piece of equipment that analyzes bats and is used at some tournaments. I wonder if it fits in an umpire's ball bag?