Sammy Sosa's Sad Sack Saga

In what has to be the least surprising news since Lindsay Lohan's death -- Wait, that still hasn't happened yet? Don't worry, it will soon -- Sammy Sosa is a steroids user.

I should mention that I once vowed never to blog about steroids, but since this is so intimately intertwined with the Cubs, I felt obligated to post. Anyway, the only thing even remotely shocking about these developments is not that Sosa used PEDs, but that there's actual scientific proof of it. Given his staunch, pseudo-broken-English denials when testifying in front of Congress a few years back, I wouldn't have thought there would be a positive test -- one that he was certainly aware of at that time -- which could irrefutably contradict his claims. I guess he really believed Bud Selig and Donald Fehr when they assured the players that the testing from 2003 was completely anonymous. For all of Sosa's missteps, trusting a used car salesman and a union head has got to be the most egregious.

Of course, as obvious as Sosa's steroid use seems in retrospect, at the time (late '90s to early '00s) I really thought Sosa was clean. And I think it goes beyond my Cubs' fan-related bias, as I thought Mark McGwire's only transgression was the (at the time legal) androstenedione spotted in his locker.* I'm pretty certain I wasn't the only one, either. It's kind of hard to explain, but even though it wasn't that long ago, it just seems like it was a completely different world. Remember, the acronym PED, so ubiquitous now, didn't even exist back then. As fans, we were all just a lot more naive and a whole lot less jaded. Following those guys -- from watching the majestic 500-foot bombs to looking at their eye-popping numbers -- was just good-old-fashioned, giggle-inducing fun. I guess it's possible that because we knew we were witnessing history, we didn't even want to consider that it might be somehow tainted. Because with Sosa's ridiculously pumped up physique, any blindness almost had to have been willful.

* As I was thinking about the McGwire andro incident, I came up with the theory that it just might have been a set-up, McGwire's contrived way of allaying steroid suspicions by getting 'caught' using something legal. It turns out, I'm not the first one to suspect that, as it's on his goddamn Wikipedia page. Really cracked that case, I did.

So if Sosa's 130 pounds of additional muscle weren't enough, should his statistics have been? Take a look at the progression of Sosa's home run rate (that is, the percentage of his plate appearances that resulted in a home run) up through 1997, his age 28 season:

That appears to be perfectly normal. Conventional baseball wisdom says that a player will generally progress to a peak between ages 26 and 28, and then regress back. So we might have expected Sosa's career graph to have ended up looking something like this:

Instead it looks like this:

Here they are together, because I've already wasted seven hours doing graphs and another 13 minutes won't make a difference:

Clearly, he must have been using something, right? His home runs spiked noticeably in his Age 29 season, reaching a level he had never come close to attaining, and he more or less stayed there for four years. That just doesn't happen.

At least that's what I thought.

In doing the research for this post, I assumed that I would find some nice, parabolic career home-run progressions for the presumably clean members of the 500-home run club, those whose playing days were over before the so-called Steroid Era began. I intended to compare Sosa not to some theoretical career path, but rather to the men surround him on the all-time home run list. To the predictable performance arc of say, Willie Mays:

Hmm. Okay, Hank Aaron:

What is that, an EKG? How about Frank Robinson:

Jesus Christ. Alright, last try. Harmon Killebrew:

** Note: I only charted the players' age 20-39 seasons, and eliminated years with fewer than 200 plate appearances.

While I guess Killebrew's kind of trends in the right direction, it's still not really close. The fact is, not one great power hitter that I looked at had an archetypal career progression. Because the expected performance curve is just the average of thousands of batters throughout major league history, and there's going to be all kinds of variation within the members of that group. Sammy Sosa's variation turned out to be substance-aided. If I knew nothing about how much muscle mass he gained during his career and I learned of his positive test, I would look at his numbers and think, Well, duh. Of course he did steroids. But I would think the exact same thing if I were shown Aaron's graph. His home run rate went up throughout his mid- and late-30's for crying out loud.

I suppose the graphic differentiation between the user and the clean players isn't in the arc, but rather the very height his line attains. When I put them all together, it becomes more apparent which line -- the one that starts the lowest and reaches the highest -- is Sosa's. It just isn't nearly as obvious as I thought it would be.

I'm going to end with something I wrote about five years ago, as it seems apropos today:

I was working for the Cubs in 2001, and for the October 2nd matchup against Cincinnati, my Crowd Management assignment was in the upper deck. Sammy Sosa had gone homerless in the previous three games, and remained stuck on 59 for the season. I desperately wanted Sammy to hit 60, so much so that each of his at-bats had become excruciating for me. With one more home run, he would become the first player in baseball history to hit 60 three times.**

** An achievement that will never be matched. Considering only one active player (Barry Bonds) has even one 60-homer season and he’s 67 years old, it’s highly unlikely that anyone will come close in the post-steroids era. There have been a total of only eight 60-homer seasons in baseball history; Sosa owns the third, fifth and sixth best single-season marks. Despite this, Sosa never led the league in any of those three seasons; he lost out to Mark McGwire in 1998 and 1999 (70-66 and 65-63, respectively) and to Bonds in 2001 (73-64). In fact, the only home run title of his career came in 2000, when he hit 50 to edge Bonds by a single dinger.

As baseball fans, we were a lot more naïve back then. While the rumors about Sosa (and McGwire and Bonds) using performance-enhancing drugs were somewhat widespread, I think most people believed they were clean, that they just worked exceptionally hard in the weight room during the offseason. It seems ridiculous now, in a time when it’s generally accepted that virtually everyone putting up huge power numbers was using something. I guess part of it was wanting to believe that jaw-dropping achievements could be realized through hard work, but as time goes by it becomes more and more apparent that what these guys did could not have been accomplished naturally.

Anyway, Sosa had been putting up such ridiculous stats year in and year out that I wanted him to have something to cement his place in baseball history. Each of his previous 60-homer seasons had been trumped by McGwire and this year he was lagging far behind Bonds’ record-breaking pace. But if he could just hit 60 again, he would always and forever be the first to have done it three times.

The pre-game was interminable; I thought the stupid game would never start. When Sosa finally stepped to the plate in the bottom of the first, the crowd gave him a warm ovation and then got very quiet. As Sammy settled into the batters’ box, everything stopped for me, although I made sure to keep moving; as far as my Crowd Management superiors were concerned, Moving = Working. Not moving was just about the worst thing you could do, other than act like a fan. That meant no cheering, yelling, heckling, or even watching the game.

Any time the bat hits the ball, at that very instant there is almost total silence in the ballpark; it takes a split-second for people to react to what’s happening, and so there is an anticipatory hush. If you were to slow down the soundtrack of a park when a home run is hit, I’d surmise that you could often hear a single fan react a moment before the rest of the crowd joins in. On the night of October 2nd, 2001, I was that fan. As soon as Sammy made contact with that 3-1 pitch, I knew it was gone. Amidst pin-dropping silence, I yelled “OH YEAHHHHHH!!!” So much for Crowd Management protocol; on this night, I was witness to history and couldn’t help myself.

And with these latest developments, Sammy Sosa has irrevocably done what I thought he did on that night nearly eight year ago -- he has cemented his place in baseball history.