How Sammy Sosa Lost It All 

Ironically he led the NL in HRs in 2000 and 2002 with 50 and 49.

Hard to be at the top during the Cheaters' Era.

​​@@timothyconard2825well since he was also cheating yeah, it would mean he'd have to be the best - and he wasn't. Edit - that's like saying it's hard to be the MVP in the league... like yeah no 💩Sherlock 😂.

- Because there was a greater bigger cheater: MARK MCGUIRE...​@@KrakenIsland64

Give all the drug cheats an asterisk

It's like how people blamed a certain man in Boston and totally leave out Red Sox having a whole other game to try to win and they couldn't do it

not a cubs fan but they need to let that poor man go.

Alex Gonzalez looks at Bartman the same way Calvin Schiraldi looks at Bill Buckner.

I agree, Gonzalez totally fucked up that inning that and Dusty Baker letting Mark Prior drown

Lifelong Cubs fan here Bartman did nothing wrong. Cubs had 3 chances to put the Marlins away, and failed to do so in games 5-7.

That he did 😂

He reminds me of an orange that's been left out on the kitchen counter too long.

and halved his size

He was/is kind of purple at one point

We used him up and then threw him out when we were done with him. Anyone with half a brain knew that Sosa, Big Mac, and Bonds were on the juice but we loved the records falling and the long ball. One of the great ironies is that Selig is in the HOF and many of the players that doped might never get inducted.

Nah we blame him along with the cheaters. There were plenty of clean players who got robbed of jobs, robbed of accolades, etc. Just because Zellig was complicit does not mean the cheaters are absolved of their wrong doings.

@@chunkymonkey428Do you both mean Selig? As is Bud Selig, the commissioner during this time? Zelig (with one L) is a Woody Allen film from the 1980s.

@@chunkymonkey428 Everyone was complicit...because it was entertaining. Sports are just entertainment and not actually important.

@@matthewbolin9646😂

Mfer gets to be in the hall of fame

How did Ortiz cheat? I'm sorry but if you knew the rules and broke them you shouldn't be in the hof period. The its all a popularity contest doesn't hold muster.

@@Denozo88Ortiz failed the same anonymous PED test that Sosa did in 2003. Electing Ortiz to the HoF is the definition of hypocrisy by the HoF voters.

Ortiz tested positive.

@@thejoshpresle when was this?

@@thejoshpresle and for what as one player was suspended for not getting a permission slip from mlb for his Adderall he was prescribed.

You are wrong about that! Many won't let you down. Some do, yeah, but not all. Foreman and Ali, two of the nicest boxers I've ever met. Ditka, Singletary, Fencik, Duerson and Payton were the nicest Bears I've met and forget about it, the Cubs of 84 and 69, all have been amazing!

They did not Cheat what they used at that time WAS NOT. BANNED in Baseball it was not illegal either…You do know ( maybe you don’t) many ball payers from the 60s and 70s took AMPHETAMINES which were Illegal Many HOF players from that era used AMPHETAMINES The Owners the coaches the Managers all knew fully well that some players on their teams were using steroids They said ABSOLUTELY nothing Baseball knew about steroids and they ignored or encourage it.Then out self preservation they went and threw these players under the Bus Are you that naive not to see the Hypocrisy here ? Every single one of these players should be in The HOF

Fans wanted HRs, MLB wanted fans. You can blame the players, but they were just doing what the fans and corporate league were asking for.

That was good!!!!

😂😂 winner winner

oh damn

Sosa turned white

Best season in my lifetime. The guy who bought some of the biggest balls from that year, Todd McFarlane, a few years ago contacted me to do a free signing in my comic book shop. Most surreal experience ever. Todd is an amazing guy. When asked if he has any regrets about paying so much for those balls? None. He says every time there is a homerun record chase in baseball, he is brought up, so the press is worth it. Not to mention he's not exactly poor these days from his comic book company and toy company.

@@ashevillecomics637 That's awesome - SPAWN fan for life!

For real. McGwire and Sosa saved baseball back then. You can tell they were both taking steroids. Everyone knew. They were making so much money for MLB.

Nostalgia at its finest

i didn't even like baseball but i still watched it, and saw Juice Monkey McGwire break the record with my dad. Good memories

Me too - 4 blocks away same time. It was great.

That would have been smart considering there were no rules against what they did.

Everyone wanted to see how far they could push the limits of the human body. While I agree that it’s kind of unfair for clean players it was what the fans wanted at the time.

​@@yankees29There was lots going on behind the scenes. If the users had came forward, admitted it, and said it wasn't illegal, it probably would have been fine. However, the users started lying publicly, paying blackmail, and one even approached his agent about how to hire a hitman. The worst of the worst is still unknown to most.

@@deplorablepepe7576 I mean I graduated high school in 95 and I knew what was going on long before that….🤣 athletes from my generation were doing juice from early high school on. I actually went to high school with a famous juice head. So i wasn’t really upset about it. Idk everyone was on something.

Exactly! In the end all it did was destroy the popularity of it's own sport.

I heard it was Harry Carry

@@TonyJackaloni that purple nosed drunk couldn’t even find his pecker when he needed to take a leak. Let alone smash a boombox. 😂

I said either him or Alou

I heard it was Ernie Banks.

@@TonyJackaloni Yeah, his ghost!! LOL!

It was Kerry Wood

@@raychapman1134 Yes, it's been pretty well documented that it was Kerry Wood.

😂

​@@raychapman1134 A pitcher who knows how to use a bat!

@@jamesoreilly16 Haha!

👍🏾👍🏾

I'm not sure why anyone cares

@@KennethFrierson-wt6xt Aight Kenny chill out

@@LGPanthers1 who's Kenny 👀

I stopped watching baseball because of him and McGuire

Shows you how standards are lowered so much since drug testing. Also shows how much of an advantage drugs gives you. Also shows you why baseball is boring and losing viewers.

@@joeiborowski9763 standards aren't lowered at all you clown lmao. Batting average is an overrated and unreliable stat that no longer has much importance. OBPS+S for example being one of several much more important stats. You're never going to see someone hit 70 dingers without drugs.

@@joeiborowski9763baseball ain’t boring or losing viewers old man

@@tgorefan I'm sure Tiddly Wink players think their sports is the most fun and popular but google is your friend. Baseball is tied at 9% with soccer, which barely registered in the polls 20 years ago and whose popularity is not likely to drop with the likes of Lionel Messi making the move to the MLS. The classic American sport is barely ahead of motor racing for sports fans’ favorite sport to watch.

@@joeiborowski9763 you do know people can watch and like more than 1 sport right? Viewership is up for the sport and will keep going up

Lol sorry bro. Lifelong cubby fan here. It's kind of laughable to compare pre juice sosa to pre juice Bonds. They both hit for some power and stole some bases as youngsters. However Bonds consistently had a BA .040 points higher and an OBP .100 points higher. I don't believe sosa won a gold glove, and I don't recall him ever being thought of as one of the best. He had good speed and a rocket arm. I recall him misplaying a lot of balls later in his career. Steroids might make you too slow to get to a fly ball, but it doesn't cause you to turn the wrong way or misjudge where the wall is. That's poor instincts. He might have been better defensively than bonds, but not a whole lot and not enough to overcome the offensive prowess of Barry bonds.

I give benefit of the doubt to him but not to the same extent. Barry was the best player w/o steroids. Sosa was a top 30 player?

@@robertgriffin5703 It's impossible to prove Barry never did steroids early on. All we know is when he decided to get huge. You don't have to use steroids to get huge. You can use them just to stay healthy. You can use them to spend less time in the gym. Still cheating and we'll never know. Sammy on the other hand had a normal career trajectory. He peaked at the normal years and declined in the normal years.

​​@@robertgriffin5703 You should not lmaoo everytime hes asked about it he comes off as a guilty person hiding...I have no doubt that he took them but he'll probably take it to his grave 😂

If you look at the seasons before 1998, Sosa's career line is .257/.308/.469, with a wRC+ of 102, which is average. His walk rate was only 6.3%, his strikeout rate was 23.5%, he was a mediocre baserunner (5.3 BsR over 9 seasons), and yeah, by Total Zone he was a very good defender in right field. His career WAR to that point was 22.9. Realistically, without his home run explosion he likely would have been a Hall of Very Good type player (and even with his monster seasons he's still at best a borderline HoF guy who I would keep out, mostly because his game was essentially about power and nothing else). Yes, he had enough speed to steal 30+ bases a season, but he was only successful 70% of the time in that span (generally 75% is right on the border of providing value stealing bases. Realistically he should have either been less aggressive or just stopped stealing entirely, as he was providing negative value). You're correct in saying that Sosa was not a one-tool player, but he was essentially a two-tool player, with one of those tools being due for massive regression as he aged. Also, I don't understand why you're talking about Sosa's career being "like a normal player" as if there wasn't something very odd about the fact that he went from a 30 homer a year guy (he hit 40 once) to averaging nearly 60 homers a year from 1998 to 2002. His wRC+ dropped 40 points over two years in his mid-30s, and then within three years he was out of baseball. Sure, Bonds was an aberration, but then he was exactly that for his entire career. I'm not going to argue that Bonds never juiced, but if you compare him to some other Hof caliber players, you get things like: Albert Pujols with a 149 wRC+ in his final season, aged 42 (honestly probably a couple years older than that) after being a below-average hitter the previous five seasons Willie Mays with a 157 wRC+ at 40, and a 132 wRC+ at 41, before injuries ended his career with a sub-par third of a season with the Mets (which should never have happened, dude should have been with the Giants through his entire career) Luke Appling with a 130 wRC+ at 42, 15 points about his career number Stan Musial with a 140 wRC+ at 41, which was roughly his average number from his aged 34 season to his aged 39 season Edgar Martinez with a 142 wRC+ at 40, and a 141 the year prior Darrell Evans with a 132 wRC+ at 40 Dave Winfield with a 140 wRC+ at 40 Hank Aaron with a 177(!) wRC+ at 39 Rickey Henderson with a 135 wRC+ at 40 My point is not that it should be expected that players can consistently be excellent hitters into their late 30s and early 40s, but that HoF players tend to be HoF players because they were able to perform at a high level well into their careers. Bonds is not an outlier when you look at players who were MVP-level early in their careers, didn't deal with injuries through most of their careers and (generally speaking) didn't play overly demanding positions like catcher (the only non-corner position players in that list were Appling and Mays, with everyone else generally playing first, third, left or right). The biggest reason why Bonds was so much better than a player like Griffey was not that he was exceptionally better when they were both in their primes, but because Bonds played a minimum of 130 games a season for all but 5 seasons of his career (one of those being his rookie season, another being the strike season, so really he only missed three seasons due to injury, and to be fair only 2005 saw him basically out for a whole year), while with Griffey from his aged 31 season on he only hit 130 twice, with 8 seasons just in that span seeing him lose at least 20% of the season due to injury (he had four seasons in that span in which he missed at least half the season). basically sosa's career tracks very well with players who relied on one or two tools for their value (in his case, power and defense, with his defense falling dramatically and his power falling off into his mid-30s), while bonds' tracks very well with true 5-tool players (and tbh i would rate bonds higher than basically every other 5 tool player, as he obviously hit more home runs than anyone else in history, he's in the top 25 all time in stolen bases [is also the only player in the 400-400 club, 500-500 club, 600-500 club, 700-500 club etc etc, and was successful about 78% of the time, so he was good and good for a long time], basically hit .300 for his career but is also in the top 6 all time for OBP [top 4 in the modern era] and is just behind Ted Williams for the highest walk rate of all time, was excellent in left during his early career [173 Total Zone runs and 20 UZR runs for four of his last six seasons, before injuries basically made him a statue), and a good arm that wasn't a rocket like Sosa, but was generally quick and accurate (172 career assists, which puts him 48th all time among OFs, although if we look at the modern era he's 10th all time).

Kerry Wood.

The ghost of Ernie Banks broke it.

I grew up as a Tiger fan in the 60's and 70's, he and Ernie Harwell were the broadcasters, those were good times.

Indeed; he is sooooo missed.

That's an excellent note.

Funny that I never really heard of harry caray until my great uncle told me during his time in ww2 fighting Japanese soldiers what they would do to off themselves when surrounded ( my great uncle could talk all day long about his two years in the Navy in his battles rip Uncle Bill) and of course Will Ferrell doing that impersonation . Being a dodgers fan I had only really known of the great late Vin Scully and Rick Monday and knowing Scotter Rizutto doing Yankees games.

It seems like Big Papa Ortiz gets a pass.

​@user-nv5iq3bp8l yes I was going to say Ortiz appears on that same list..

it was Wood.

I had read it was mark grace. Honestly grace seems the most likely to me Since he was a real team leader as opposed to what so-so pretended to be

I think Woody has a collection of things he had to pay for during his career due to temper. Water fountains coolers etc.

Sosa (at senate hearing): “No habla inglés.”

thank you my friend:)

Much like the Astros in 2017, and deservedly so.

​@@LDQBBQ Oh man, it's not like there were plenty of other teams that did it better than Houston, although what the Astros did was not good. The funny fact was what the Astros did actually was ineffective and didn't really change anything.

@manzac112 if it was ineffective they wouldn't have done it.

Typical really. Likely Selig, the owners and the MLBPA were in on it. When you're talking people with that much power, influence and money its not surprising. Scapegoating is the name of the game.

Read … The Game of Shadows. Then…. You will understand.

And didn't even lead his own league once, craziest stat

Especially on the matter of ethics and integrity.

segue

@@kens2328 voice text lol

Fuckin' tired with this roids BS i grew up in the 90'swatching the '98run i loved it. It was dun as a kid everybody was doing it since the 70's big whoop!

I grew up watching baseball in the 80's pre steroids and in middle school, we noticed the steroids. When Jose Canesco was in Oakland, we called him Jose Cansteroid. It was so obvious. As a joke, I wrote a letter to the Commissioner, got the address out of Baseball Digest, and mocked them for not being able to figure out something that every kid in America knows. Three years later, I actually received a reply out of the blue thanking me for taking time out to write and "your concerns are duly noted." Everyone knew. And yes, Selig and the execs don't deserve Cooperstown for this, and neither do the players. Sosa and McGwire wouldn't have had to save baseball if the owners didn't cancel a season and a World Series, and how many kids did players affect in a negative way by encouraging such a shortcut? They all cheated the game, the public, and themselves.

Yes. We keep hearing that.

No they weren't

The average ERA in the league went up by nearly a full run during the steroid era, from 3.6 to 4.5. People should have figured out something was wrong when 20-game winners had ERAs above 4!

There is no way he knew he was using a corked bat.

@@mizer9510 LOL

who?

Get over yourself