Sosa, Steroids and Speculation
Plus a few other thoughts as we head into a huge weekend of college football.
How about a few quick thoughts for the final weekend before Christmas…
— If you want to vote for who won the PosCast Holiday Draft… well, you can do so now over at the PosCast Newsletter!
— Sammy Sosa sort of, kind of made some news on Thursday when he sort of, kind of admitted to taking performance-enhancing drugs. From his letter:
“I understand why some players in my era don’t always get the recognition that our stats deserve. There were times I did whatever I could to recover from injuries in an effort to keep my strength up to perform over 162 games. I never broke any laws, but in hindsight, I made mistakes, and I apologize.”
Sosa did this so that he would be welcomed back into the Cubs family, which he was—the Cubs announced that they’re inviting him to the 2025 Cubs Convention. I’m glad for the invitation; Sosa was an incredible player, one of the greatest and most beloved in Cubs history, and this reunion feels long overdue.
I was thinking about something Sosa-related the other day. Here are the top Hall of Fame vote seasons for the players I believe have been kept out mostly because of PED suspicions and allegations:
Barry Bonds, 2022, 66%
Roger Clemens, 2022, 65.2%
Gary Sheffield, 2024, 63.9%
Alex Rodriguez, 2023, 35.7%
Manny Ramirez, 2023, 33.2%
Mark McGwire, 2010, 23.7%
Sammy Sosa, 2022, 18.5%
Rafael Palmeiro, 2012, 12.6%
When you look at that list, in that order, I think you see a near-perfect hierarchy based on the consensus answer to the hypothetical question: “Would this player have been a Hall of Famer WITHOUT performance-enhancing drugs?”*
*The one slight exception is Sheffield: I think he got such a high vote total in his last year on the ballot because people believe his PED use was light and perhaps even involuntary. Then again, even this is sort of an answer to the “Would this player have been a Hall of Famer without PEDs?” question.
My point is: Everything surrounding the legacy of those players in the Selig Era is built around speculation and nonsense. How could we possibly know what these players’ careers would have been like without PEDs? I mean, would Rafael Palmeiro have not been a 3,000-hit, 500-homer guy? Can we really say that we know that? Heck, Palmeiro insists to this day he didn’t use steroids—he says his positive test in 2005 was the result of a tainted B-12 sample—and people will boldly speculate that he’s lying, but they don’t know. None of us know.
We can’t know, but then that’s at the heart of all of this: We know nothing. We don’t know who used, who didn’t, how much, how little or what impact it actually had on their careers. It’s all speculation. It’s simply a fact that there are lots and lots of players in the Hall of Fame who used drugs. We put them into categories. Alcohol is fine—not performance-enhancing. Amphetamines are fine—might be performance-enhancing, but not to the level that bothers us (apparently). Some steroid whispers and allegations are fine—we can shrug our shoulders and say “We don’t really know,” when the player is likable enough.
When Dave Parker was elected to the Hall of Fame, I was happy—happy for him, happy for his fans, happy to see a childhood hero enshrined. But the logic is so twisted it’s hard to trundle through the maze. Dave Parker was a known cocaine abuser; it just about detailed his career. So using drugs that diminish your career is OK for the Hall of Fame, but not drugs that enhance it? How does that work?
I’m thrilled to see Sammy Sosa back in the fold with the Cubs. And if making him obliquely apologize for using PEDs is what allowed that to happen, well, hey, whatever it takes. But it all feels really silly. Sammy Sosa brought more thrills to Chicago Cubs fans than anybody since Ernie Banks. I don’t quite know why he has to apologize for that.
Happy Holidays! Just a reminder that Joe Blogs is a reader-supported newsletter, and I’d love and appreciate your support.
— I’m actually quite fired up for Saturday’s college football extravaganza. I’ve written before how I’ve lost a lot of college football interest, but Saturday should feel a little bit like what those wonderful end-of-year bowl days felt like—wall-to-wall college football! I’m ready.
Here’s the full schedule:
SMU at Penn State, noon, TNT/Max
Clemson at Texas, 4 p.m., TNT/Max
Tennessee at Ohio State, 8 p.m., ABC/ESPN
— This just arrived from Molly Knight, who took a photo of this sticker on somebody’s back windshield.
— OK, we’re at those final days before Christmas, so there’s still time for you late gift shoppers to buy a fun football book or a fun baseball book or a delightful newsletter subscription for somebody in your life, or even somebody you’ve never met!
And I should mention, though it’s early, that the paperback of WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL will be coming out on March 11—I wrote a special bonus essay for that one.
How can you include a section about last-minute holiday shopping and NOT include a link to where we can acquire that wonderful, wonderful sticker?
Saying "we know nothing" is at best a deliberate obfuscation, at worst an out and out lie.
We have the Mitchell Report, we have the Balco Case. We have reporting on the Biogenesis scandal. We have congressional testimony and we have a ton of simple admissions. Certainly there are gaps in the reporting in spots, but those gaps can close.
Witness Sosa, who to my mind prior to yesterday, had had a devil's advocate case for being clean
No longer, though.
And Sosa is a good exemplar. We didn't know. But we kinda knew. And we were right.
Seems to me it's a completely fair approach to take a punitive tack with those found guilty (comparatively--it's Keep 'em out of the Hall, not jail time, after all) combined with a high bar for evidence, where for example, mention in one of Canseco's books or even persistent rumors is not considered sufficient.
And that can only be a realistic approach if we don't in fact "know nothing."
I should also say that the thing about Dave Parker taking cocaine by the thimbleful is that his doing so did not put other players in danger. But every player who decided to take PEDS increased the necessity for others--rookies, AAAers, 25th men-- to at least consider their use.
There were of course many average to below average players who used PEDS, and if you said they'd been largely forgotten, you'd probably be right. But you can at least make a case that the marginal damage the average players did was much less than that done by the famous, ultra-talented guys, whose decision to use tipped the scales on the decisions made by many many more. So shining the bright light on them is *not* unfair but just the way it should be.