Continuing a series examining the candidates eligible for induction into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The writers' ballots are due by December 31st and the Class of 2013 will be announced in early January.
After Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are the two players most associated with cheating in baseball. McGwire has admitted to using steroids; Sosa almost certainly used too, and was also caught using a corked bat for good measure. There are dozens of sanctimonious baseball writers out there who would rather commit ritualistic suicide than cast a Hall of Fame vote for either of these two sluggers, simply because of a flawed moral stance on performance-enhancing drugs. Well, there's good news and bad news for those writers. The good news: Sosa might not even have the numbers to deserve enshrinement on his own merits anyway. The bad news: McGwire most definitely does.
We start with Sosa, a right fielder most famous for his days with the Chicago Cubs. Baseball has only ever seen eight 60-homer seasons, and Sosa owns three of them. For his career, he hit 612 homers, making him one of only eight men to hit at least 600. The other seven don't need first-name introductions: Bonds, Aaron, Ruth, Mays, Rodriguez, Griffey, Thome. Sosa is in elite company.
The problem is that much of his career was actually defined by more mediocrity than one might expect from a member of that exclusive club. He arrived in the big leagues for the first time at the age of 20 in 1989 but didn't have his first great season until 1998. What happened in between?
1989-1997: 1,088 games, .257 batting average, .308 on-base percentage, .469 slugging percentage, 23 HR/year, 22 steals/year
For almost a decade, during a stretch of his career that should have included some premier seasons, Sosa was barely an above-average player. A .308 on-base percentage for an everyday player during the 1990s? That's just awful. He stole some bases, but at a 71% success rate, which isn't good either. At least he was a strong defender in right field, or else he would have been nearly useless. Then all of a sudden, at age 29, he exploded. His four seasons between 1998 and 2001 were, for lack of a better word, ridiculous:
1998-2001: 637 games, .310 batting average, .396 on-base percentage, .662 slugging percentage, 61 HR/year
During that four-year sweet spot, Sammy Sosa averaged 61 home runs per year. That's unfathomable. He won an MVP and was the runner-up for another one. He was the best player in baseball not named Barry Bonds or Alex Rodriguez. After 2001, his production returned to human levels. He had two more very good seasons and then stuck around long enough to reach the 600-homer plateau before retiring after 2007.
So which version of Sosa should be weighed more heavily when considering his case for Cooperstown? Those 637 games of invincibility, or the 1,088 games of mediocrity? This is where subjective arguments come into play. Is a short peak of Sandy Koufax-like dominance good enough to warrant entrance into the Hall? Or is some degree of sustained excellence required? Sosa is certainly lacking on that latter criterion, but some voters will still support him on the strength of his four-year run of Koufaxian supremacy. That's a very justifiable opinion. Plus, for people who like the classic career milestones, 600 home runs is hard to ignore.
Personally, however, I just don't think that Sosa makes the cut. His career line ended up at .273/.344/.534, which is thoroughly unimpressive for a corner outfielder who played in the most offense-friendly era in baseball history. The average career Wins Above Replacement total for a Hall of Fame right fielder is right around 70; Sosa's WAR was just 54.8. Right fielders with more career WAR include Dwight Evans, Reggie Smith, and Bobby Bonds, none of whom were inducted into Cooperstown. He's a borderline candidate, somebody I wouldn't hypothetically vote for, but certainly not someone who would "lessen" the Hall if got there someday.
Mark McGwire, a first baseman who played for the Oakland Athletics and St. Louis Cardinals, is a whole different beast. He finished two slots behind Sosa on the career home run list (he's in 10th-place with 583). But his peak might have been even better than Sosa's: in the five seasons between 1995 and 1999, he hit .287/.438/.702 with an average of 57 home runs and 110 walks per year. That includes his 1998 season when he hit 70 home runs, shattering Roger Maris's single-season record that had stood since 1961. He finished 2nd in the MVP voting that year despite putting up much better numbers than the winner -- a Chicago Cub by the name of Sammy Sosa.
McGwire also had the sustained run of success that Sosa didn't. In 1,097 games spanning the decade between 1992 and his final season in 2001, McGwire hit .277/.424/.663 while averaging 40 homers per year. That stretch doesn't even include his rookie season in 1987, when he led the league in home runs with a rookie record of 49. Had he not missed significant time to injuries during the early-1990s, there's no telling which stratosphere his career numbers might have ended up in.
McGwire retired as a .263/.394/.588 hitter. That .588 career slugging percentage is 8th-best all-time. His career OPS of .982 is 10th-best all-time. There are 18 first basemen in the Hall of Fame and McGwire hit more home runs than all of them. By career Wins Above Replacement, he would rank as the 9th-best player at his position in the Hall. He fits in very comfortably among the very best first basemen -- and hitters -- to ever play the game.
So if the baseball writers really don't want to see steroid users in the Hall of Fame, they can vote against Sammy Sosa with a clear conscience. There are flaws to be found in his candidacy. But there's no statistical reason to keep McGwire out of the Hall. The only excuse to leave him off a ballot is performance-enhancing drugs. And the Hall of Fame has already accepted candidates who used performance-enhancing drugs, and it will again in the future. McGwire shouldn't be the victim of selective morality.
My Ballot, As of Now:
1. Barry Bonds
2. Roger Clemens
3. Mike Piazza
4. Craig Biggio
5. Jeff Bagwell
6. Mark McGwire
Out: Sammy Sosa
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