He is not a first ballot, no chance. But given time and the way Sammy played to the Writers and the fans, maybe just maybe he gets in. Unlike Bonds, who made enemies of the Sport Writers, Sammy new which side his bread was buttered

That he got buff from Red Beans and Rice. They gave him the needed omph to hit the long ball.

I don’t think many think Sosa will be a first ballot HOFer

The presumption of innocence does not apply.

NOBODY was outed during the steroid era and…nobody wanted to open that can of worms.

I get that you want to bend over backwards to believe that your hero was the one untainted slugger of the whole era but it’s patently absurd.

Is there a source to see who sold the most jerseys or memorabilia?

Like I said above, Gaylord Perry is in the HOF, they don’t care about putting cheaters in.

They had to go through the rest of the season knowing they weren’t in the playoffs. Who’s he that he didn’t have to do the same? Imagine if Ernie Banks stopped showing up after his teams were eliminated.

We’re not talking about a fan-favorite here. Sammy hurt a lot of Cubs fans and as a result, they don’t like him anymore, and many believe him to have been using steroids (right or wrong, I can’t say for certain). It seems reasonable to me that he might have a lot more detractors in Chicago than across the country because of how his relationship with the team crumbled.

Kinda like an ex-girlfriend(/boyfriend) after a relationship has gone sour – you’re not going to be the best person to objectively judge that person. Maybe the writers will do a better job of it (and maybe they will still find him unworthy).

from your pictures, I can see the difference between Bonds’ two pics, but NOT the Sosa pics. They’re not comparative enough. I don’t see a difference. For example, his legs in the 93 and 96 pics look approximately the same, and we can’t see his legs in the first pic. His arms look a little bigger from 93 to 96, but weigh-lifting can do that. And Sosa said he was using something called “androgyne”, didn’t he? It was something made to add bulk.

You mean that it’s possible for a player to get bigger over a 6 year period?!

What a dumb argument.

1. Body size means almost nothing in terms of actual power production. Whether he took roids or not really doesn’t bother me.
2. Roids don’t improve your hitting ability at best it barely improves your power because you need to improve lower body muscle immensely to do this. Steroids and weight lifting can’t give you enough extra lower body weight.
3. Why so many home runs maybe look at the ball.

A baseball statistician Eric Walker has a website called Steroids and Baseball where he investigates some of the myths of steroids and the “steroids era” http://steroids-and-baseball.com

First, steroids mainly help one improve upper body strength, lower body strength is the key to hitting power:
http://steroids-and-baseball.com/actual-effects.shtml

This point—made near the top of this page—cannot be hammered hard enough: steroids have a markedly greater influence on upper-body musculature than on lower-body musculature. I will not here repeat the many probative citations available because they already appear on the medical-effects page of this site. But it is sheer, indubitable fact.
stylized batter swinging

That being so, it is wrong to assume that some x pounds of added total-body musculature represents the extra muscle available to power a baseball. All that counts, all that is functional for this particular, exacting task, is lower-body muscle. Let me say it again for emphasis: Batting power is all about lower-body strength. Bulging biceps and triceps may wow the baseball Annies—and perhaps scandal-sniffing reporters—but they mean essentially nothing to long-ball hitting. If we just blindly plug total-body muscle-weight gains (especially if we think them steroid-augmented) into the bat-speed formula, we are breaching one of its inherent assumptions, bodily proportionality, and hence we will assuredly get meaningless and thus misleading results.
See, for example, Professor Roger Tobin’s paper, cited above, in which he makes exactly that mistake and comes to the bizarre conclusion that steroid-assisted ballplayers can hit 50% or more extra home runs from a simple 10% muscle gain in body weight; one would have thought that that result in itself would send anyone back to the drawing board, running, but apparently it did not in this case—despite the, um, glaring shall we say? lack of 50% (or 40% or 10% or 5%) increases in home runs in the steroid era in general or from particular individuals accused of serious steroid use. Cobbler, stick to thy last.

2. Distribution of body mass increases when working out, especially with steroids and it’s effect on hitting.

So, when we consider whether a ballplayer who has added weight in the form of muscle has added to his ability to power a ball, we really can only add in, in these equations, that amount of muscle showing up in lower-body strength. While I suppose it’s anatomically impossible, a batter who added, say, 5 pounds of muscle to his lower body and zero to his upper body would be just as power-ball-enhanced as a batter who added 20 pounds of total muscle of which 5 was lower body and 15 upper body.
calculator

Thus, if we want to get a handle on potential steroid gains, we have to make some assumption about just what the growth-assisting differential ratio actually is. That, regrettably, is hard to do: such phrases as “more than”, “differentially”, “greater”, “most marked”, and the like are awfully imprecise. Let’s try looking at two cases: a 4:1 ratio and a 3:1 ratio of upper-body to lower-body development. We will assume that the player in question has added a full 10% of body weight as sheer muscle—that’s a 200-pound man adding 20 pounds of pure muscle. In our first case, that means he’s presumably added 4 of those pounds to his lower body (which comports well with the stereotyped “triangle” body of broad shoulders with huge biceps, triceps, delts, and so on). That is an effective addition, for the batting-distance equations, of a 2% increase. From the tabled calculation results above, that would work out, roughly, to adding between 2 and 3 feet to his optimally batted ball distance (circa 2.5 feet, or 30 inches. If we assume instead a 3:1 upper/lower ratio, we have 5 extra pounds, a 2.5% increase, and the added distance becomes about 45 inches.

None of those numbers are anything like exact, and are not meant to be. What they are meant to be is a demonstration that the idea of even a man who adds hugely (and 20 pounds of sheer muscle is not small potatoes) to his musculature is not suddenly going to go from gap power to moon shots. A plausible estimate is that he can add from 2 to at most 4 feet to the average distance of his most solidly hit drives. The number of balls that a given batter hits in a season that are, say, a yard or less short of just going out is impossible for anyone other than Stats, Inc. to know with any precision. One very, very rough indicator is from their 1995 Baseball Scoreboard, in which they note that the number of “home-run-saving catches” for the prior season was 64 across all of MLB. Because many parks have fences too high to allow such catches, we can arbitrarily double that number and get 128 just-over-the-fence balls, which is roughly 4 marginal balls a season per club. Heck, double that to allow for catchable over-fence balls not gotten to. That’s still around one a year per man. I grant at once that that is very far from any kind of exact number, but it does suggest—strongly, in my opinion, but you judge—that few men hit many balls a year for which an extra 30 or even 40 inches is going to make the difference between in and out of the park.
more indepth information regarding this topic can be found here: http://steroids-and-baseball.com/medical-effects.shtml#DISTRIBUTION

and here’s just a few of the many who agree with Walker’s findings:

*

      Professor Arthur DeVany’s paper"Steroids, Home Runs and the Law of Genius" (From the summary: There is no evidence that steroid use has altered home run hitting and those who argue otherwise are profoundly ignorant of the statistics of home runs, the physics of baseball, and of the physiological effects of steroids.)
    *

      Baseball Prospectus’ March 30, 2005, “Setting the Stage” column by analyst Nate Silver: Steroids: This is far from a perfect experiment. But at the very least, it is highly problematic for the Steroid Gap Theory.
    *

      Baseball Prospectus’ book Baseball Between the Numbers, with a chapter “What Do Statistics Tell Us About Steroids?”, again by Nate Silver but using a different approach than the article above: By this definition, Power Spikes have been neither any more nor any less frequent in the [so-called] Juiced Era than in previous periods.
    *

      The Juice, book by Will Carroll containing a chapter-length analysis by Jay Jaffe in which no effect is detected; the text is not available on line, but what is available are Carroll’s comments: As Jay Jaffe showed in The Juice and Nate Silver showed in Baseball Between The Numbers, there’s no statistical evidence that performance-enhancing drugs of any type show up in the numbers. I’m not saying there’s not an effect, just that people smarter than me can’t find it statistically.
    *

      Professors Jonathan R. Cole (sociology, Columbia) and Stephen M. Stigler (statistics, University of Chicago), in an article “More Juice, Less Punch” in the December 22, 2007 Op-Ed section of The New York Times, examined before-and-after stats for identified steroid users and concluded that examination of the data on the players featured in the Mitchell report suggests that in most cases the drugs had either little or a negative effect.

3. Maybe someone really should investigate the ball. (again on this page of the site: http://steroids-and-baseball.com/actual-effects.shtml)

First, though, let’s take a moment out to look more closely at those sudden jumps, here attributed to changes in the baseball itself, because they are important to our understanding. There will always be skeptics who deny, with much handwaving and little data, anything they choose not to believe. But, regrettably for their cause in this instance, there is definite, hard scientific data to prove the point. While a precis of the studies appears below, for a much richer elaboration on just what was done how, and what the results were and what they signify, visit the page here wholly dedicated to the science of the changing baseball.

First, In 2000, scientists at the University of Rhode Island physically examined baseballs from several widely separated seasons. Their conclusions?
[T]he researchers found that pills [ball cores] from the 1995 and 2000 balls bounced an average of 33 percent higher than their 1989, 1970 and 1963 counterparts. One of their conclusions is that Rawlings Sporting Goods Co., the maker of Major League baseballs, doesn’t follow its own specifications for some of the windings used in the balls.

“In forensic science we want to compare items that are as much alike as possible, and we know that 37 years of heat, light and moisture could affect the 1963 ball. We believe that the pill was well preserved because the windings and the cover protected it. We believe the pill is what gives the ball its resiliency.”

That last is noteworthy, because MLB’s defenders routinely claim that balls from different years cannot meaningfully be compared owing to “aging effects”. But, as we see, competent scientists sharply disagree. The entire article, linked above, richly repays the brief reading time required. (It also shows that the yarn in the windings is out of spec as well.)

And that is scarcely the only scientific examination of the physical ball itself to reach the same conclusions. A CT scan of 1998 baseballs done by Pennsylvania State University in conjunction with Universal Medical Systems also found, um, interesting things about them:
cutaway diagram of internally banded baseball Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball from his record-breaking 1998 season contains a synthetic rubber ring or spring (“the ring”) — a material not outlined in official Major League Baseball (“the League”) specifications. . . . “Examining the CT images of Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball one can clearly see the synthetic ring around the core — or ‘pill’ — of the baseball,” states David Zavagno, president of Universal Medical Systems. “While Mark McGwire may or may not have used illegal steroids, the evidence shows his ball — under the governing body of the League — was juiced.” CT images of McGwite baseball

The examination also looked at other baseballs from 1998, so McGwire was not getting personal favors from MLB.

The scientists doing those examinations were constrained by what baseballs from which years were actually available to them for inspection. But the PF, as graphed above, allows us to see the exact years in which the changes were made. It would be fascinating to re-construct the graph above by, in effect, “slicing out” the gains from changes in the ball, but I have not attempted that, as it might reek too much of subjectivity. But there is nothing subjective about its interpretation: on several occasions in baseball history, including one within the last 15 years, the ball has been expressly and significantly juiced. Whether the juicings were by deliberate calculation and directive (almost certainly the case in 1920), or just the results of occasional changes in the manufacturing process (the obvious cause in 1977 and the likely cause in 1993) is immaterial; that there were such changes is undeniable in the face of the evidence.

It is absolutely essential that any analysis of batting performance take explicit cognizance of that fact. Batting stats from the period 1977 – 1992 and the period 1993 – 2007 are simply incommensurable: comparisons can only be made within those eras, not across them.
(Unless, of course, one makes careful mathematical adjustments to the raw statistics.)

Now, to avoid those incommensurability problems, here’s the same graph with all the discontinuities (except the 1910 cork-core jump, which is too small to bother about) sliced out, and the data spliced together to make a true showing of actual power changes, independent of changes in the ball:
spliced power-factor graph
If that “splicing” perchance confuses you, look here.

All of a sudden, we see that baseball has really had, so far as power goes, three major eras. Naturally, within each there are jigs, both up and down, from year to year, but they are (saving perhaps the 1986 – 1987 bump that no one seems to understand) relatively small jigs on the overall scale of the graph. The tilted red lines are the intra-era average movements in PF
So that there be no accusation of fiddling the data to make it fit a theory, let’s see exactly what was done to make that graph:

1. The artificial “valleys” of WW I and WW II were smoothed out by replacing the data for 1917 – 1918 and for 1942 – 1946 with an even transition between the data points for 1916 and 1919, and 1941 and 1947, respectively; that seems unexceptionable. No effort was made to compensate for any Vietnam-era effects, though they may play a major role in the decline that began more or less simultaneous with the start of that period.

2. The discontinuous jumps were subtracted out as they occurred. That is, the size of difference between, for example, 1920 and 1921 was subtracted from all years from 1921 on; the gap between 1976 and 1977 was further subtracted from all years from 1977 on; and the gap from 1992 to 1994 was yet further subtracted from all years from 1994 on (1993 was set at the same values as 1992 and 1994). This does hide whatever actual zigs or zags there may have been at the discontinuities—that is, what annual changes there may have been not attributable to changes in the ball—but, as can be seen, such annual zig-zags are normally small.

If we look at those intra-era average movements, something has to jump forcefully out at anyone: from 1962 on, true power has been declining. (Here, “true power” means simply power exclusive of artificial boosts from isolated, big-jump changes in the baseball itself.) The rate of decline from 1962 on through 1981 was dramatic. From 1983 on through the present, it has been nearly flat (it looks like a slight downtrend because the bizarre 1986/1987 spike “front-loads” the average, but I didn’t want to arbitrarily smooth out those years).

It thus becomes quite impossible to believe in any theory that speaks of “boosting” power in modern times, simply because there has been no such boost. Here’s a blow-up graph of the so-called “steroid era”, starting at 1982 (because 1981 was strike-shortened and thus not a good data point). Understand that in this graph nothing has been “spliced out” save the single ball juicing of 1993/1994 (whether 1993 was or was not post-juicing is still debated); the numbers on the left would change were earlier splicings and wartime smoothings dropped, but the shape and scale of the graph would be unchanged.

All in all, I think before jumping to conclusions based on photos and conjecture a person should do some research. What Sammy Sosa did was a product of his talent with perhaps within the context of the era and the context of the equipment that was being played with (i.e. what kind of ball was being used).

Notwithstanding the retirement announcement now, he last played in 2007, so that makes him eligible for the 2013 election.

Is the best RF we’ve had since then. Perhaps RF is the new 3B for us.

you seem to have a lot of nothing to say.

If you want someone to take your bet, I’ll see you in 2013, 2014, 2015

To me it’s about showing why the Sammy hate is not only ridiculous, but unwarranted. I could care less what Bill Plaschke thinks, I care about stating objective facts about a great player who doesn’t deserve to be slammed the way he is being slammed.

to your earlier comment:

Sammy has no chance of ever getting into the Hall. He will never come remotely close to 75% of the vote. So I’m not going to debate this any further.

So. Should we take from this that you are a habitual breaker of your word?

and some marked that as a good HOF number.

but if we look at the current inductees under a microscope, should those in be re-evaulated, and any of them who used the spit ball, or greenies be removed since that was cheating the game as well? Where is the line drawn? The HOF is a museum for stats, and those who put them up in amazing fashion. It is not a museum of “Boy Scout” lifestyles.

The entire museum is a joke IMO when you see Eckersly or Winfield in but Andre Dawson and Lee Smith not. Not saying that they are not worth to be in, but there are more worthy not in many years later. Based on that, I truly could care less anymore about the HOF, since it is a bigger popularity contest than the All Star Game, but this time the popularity contest in pure “Political” with the Media and those in. If you are a reliever and want to be known as an elitist, you dont want another reliever in, since that takes the spotlight off you. So you vote for others, which in essance is voting against a worthy player. How else do you explain the below results for the 2009 HOF voting?

Player Votes Percent
†Rickey Henderson 511 94.8
Jim Rice 412 76.4
Andre Dawson 361 67
Bert Blyleven 338 62.7
Lee Smith 240 44.5
Jack Morris 237 44
Tommy John 171 31.7
Tim Raines 122 22.6
Mark McGwire 118 21.9
Alan Trammell 94 17.4
Dave Parker 81 15
Don Mattingly 64 11.9
Dale Murphy 62 11.5
Harold Baines 32 5.9
†Mark Grace* 22 4.1
†David Cone* 21 3.9
†Matt Williams* 7 1.3
†Mo Vaughn* 6 1.1
†Jay Bell* 2 0.4
†Jesse Orosco* 1 0.2
†Ron Gant* 0 0
†Dan Plesac* 0 0
†Greg Vaughn* 0 0

Candidates who were eligible for the first time are indicated here with a †. The candidates who received at least 75% of the vote and were elected are indicated in bold italics. The candidates who received less than 5% of the vote, thus becoming ineligible for future BBWAA consideration, are indicated with an *.

Then you have players who are banned for life, like Sholess Joe Jackson, who has served his “life” suspension, and should be inducted now, but never will

last ditch effort to remind people he’s out there and try to stir up one last chance.

There’s no question about this. The reason people are upset now is that it was apparently done fraudulently. People want to believe something like that is real, not artificially enhanced.