Sammy Sosa’s corked bat is only the latest chapter of chicanery in baseball, a sport filled with petty larcenies, grand thefts and clever cheating.

In baseball, it’s legal to steal bases but not quite legit to steal signs, though teams do it all the time.

Over the years, bats have been corked, filled with rubber, and hammered with nails to give them extra clout. Pitchers have thrown spitters, greased balls with petroleum jelly, scuffed them with emery boards and rubbed them on their belt buckles to give them funny twists. Managers have stooped to giving their pitchers refrigerated balls to deaden them when the visiting team is up.

More than any other sport, baseball has tolerated and even celebrated cheating as part of the game for more than a century. As the title of one book on the subject suggests, “It Ain’t Cheatin’ If You Don’t Get Caught.”

Whether or not Sosa made an innocent mistake playing with a corked bat Tuesday night, he stepped over to the shady side of sports and stained a career that seemed destined to land him in the Hall of Fame. He may get there yet, even if skeptics will always wonder if some of his 505 home runs so far have come with the help of funny bats.

Not that there’s any proof that corked bats do any good, anyway. Some believe the opposite is true.

“You have a slightly lighter bat and you’re going to hit the ball a little less far,” said retired Yale professor Robert K. Adair, the author of “Physics of Baseball.”

Adair contends a corked bat may reduce by about 3 feet what would have been a 375-foot drive from a conventional wooden bat.

Yet even if cork is more a mythical boost than a real one, Sosa still broke the rules and became the sixth major leaguer to be disciplined for a corked bat since 1997.

Sosa’s trick bat — he says he previously used it only for batting practice — doesn’t sink him to the level of Olympic sprinter Ben Johnson, who loaded up on illegal steroids to win the 100-meters at the 1988 Olympics before being caught and stripped of the gold.

But Sosa’s crime, even given baseball’s felonious history, puts him in the company of other cheaters, in and out of sports.

“There are cheaters in sports, just as there are on Wall Street and in corporate America — people who try to gain an unfair advantage,” Peter Roby, director of Northeastern University’s Center for the Study of Sport in Society, said Wednesday. “We don’t know that Sosa was corking all his bats, but it certainly does put a shadow on all his accomplishments. And it sends an unfortunate message to fans and young players that cheating goes on at the highest levels of the game.”

Sosa’s image had been one of joy and generosity. He applauded his rival, Mark McGwire, during their home run record chase in 1998 and insisted he never touched the kind of muscle-builder McGwire acknowledged using. Where McGwire had andro in his locker, Sosa pointed to Flintstones vitamins in his.

That clean-cut image makes Sosa’s fall all the more hurtful for his fans.

“Your reputation, at the end of the day, is all you really have,” Roby said. “That’s what I think is unfortunate about Sosa. He feels like he let people down.”

Sosa admitted as much.

“It’s going to be tough. Some fans are probably not too happy about it,” Sosa said. “I’ve got to deal with that. … I know that I lost the fans and they have been great to me. It’s a mistake, and I take the blame for it.”

From Little League to the Olympics, sports are supposed to build character and teach integrity. Yet at every level, there are players, parents, coaches and officials who would just as soon cheat and lie in pursuit of fame and fortune.

Elite athletes, asked if they would take a pill that would help them win an Olympic gold medal even if it could eventually kill them, overwhelmingly said they would, Wichita State sports psychologist Greg Buell said.