“Moving Forward” with Sammy Sosa
Damn, RIP to Rickey Henderson, who died this weekend. It feels fittingly tragic that Henderson, the greatest Oakland A ever, died the off-season after the Athletics played their final game in Oakland. It’s like Charles Schulz dying the day before the final Peanuts cartoon ran or Bo Schembechler dying the week of the biggest Ohio State/Michigan game… Anyway, losing Rickey is a blow to baseball, but if you’re still in the mood to read about baseball in December here’s a post about Sammy Sosa instead.
Sammy Sosa and the Cubs have finally made up.
Ever since Sammy Sosa left the clubhouse early on the final day of the 2004 season — the final nail in the coffin of a relationship that had grown hostile and unworkable — the franchise has barely acknowledged their iconic player. He has not been invited back to Wrigley Field or had his number retired; he was not part of the celebrations when the Cubs finally won the World Series in 2016. But last Thursday, in a move that was clearly coordinated, Sammy Sosa released an apology, and then, minutes later, Cubs owner Tom Ricketts accepted that apology and said that the team wants to “move forward.”
And that’s how you know something fishy is going on. Calls to “move forward” are the final victory lap of any great conspiracy: It’s what President Obama said when he announced he wouldn’t prosecute anyone in the Bush Administration for their crimes, and it’s what President Ford used to justify his pardon of Richard Nixon. The stakes here are not as high as all that, but as a baseball fan, it bothers me even more.
For one, what is Sammy Sosa even apologizing for? In his statement, he wrote: “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.” Everyone is taking this to be an admission of steroid use, but it’s so vague as to be almost meaningless. He did “whatever [he] could to recover from injuries”? Surely that is not a “mistake.” It would only be a mistake if he violated some rule “in an effort to keep [his] strength up to perform over 162 games” — but he also insists that he “never broke any laws.”
Of course, steroids are the obvious answer that threads this needle. Sosa would not have to break any law to use steroids, since laws mostly target the sale and distribution of steroids, and Sosa may have taken substances that were legal in his home country of the Dominican Republic. But steroids WERE banned by baseball, and since many people do believe that they help players recover from injury, then that seems like the only thing Sosa could be talking about.
But a key fact in all this is that: Steroids do not actually help players recover from injury or keep their strength up for 162 games!
I do not really understand how this myth got started, but there is absolutely no evidence that steroids can keep baseball players healthy or help them recover faster from injuries. That is just a lie told by people who want to sell you steroids.
Also, in the specific case of Sammy Sosa, the injuries he suffered were especially unlikely to be helped by steroids (which, as a reminder, are useful mainly as a way of adding muscle mass): In 2003, the the year Sosa reportedly failed a drug test, he missed time for a broken toenail, and likely sustained a concussion when he was hit in the head by a pitch. How exactly are anabolic steroids supposed to fix your toenail or treat your concussion?
This might seem irrelevant. After all, Sosa might have been misinformed about the medical benefits of the drugs. And the reason he took PEDs is not as important as admitting that he used them in the first place. But again: He hasn’t actually admitted anything. He hasn’t said what drugs he took or when he took them or for how long. All he’s done is allude to some false ideas about steroids, but apparently that is enough to satisfy the people in charge.
Which brings us to my second question: Who is Sosa even apologizing to? Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts released a statement immediately afterwards, essentially accepting Sosa’s apology. But the Ricketts family didn’t even own the team when Sosa played for the Cubs, and they really have no relationship to him. Even if Ricketts is accepting the apology on behalf of the Cubs franchise, it’s not clear how Sosa actually harmed them by using drugs. In fact, as many people before me have pointed out, the owners clearly benefited from the attention that Sosa and his pursuit of the single-season home run record brought to the game.
Craig Calcaterra made this point over at his own baseball newsletter:
“There was always a pretty strong current among fans and baseball officials who wanted to have their cake and eat it too when it came to homers and PEDs in the 1990s and early 2000s. They loved them dingers but they wanted to – quite selectively – moralize about them too. I’m not sure those folks are owed any apologies. The only people I truly think were owed apologies were players who either (a) had their careers harmed or cut short because they were competing against players who doped; and (b) players who felt compelled to dope against their better judgment in order to survive. Whatever the case, none of the other big stars who got caught up in PEDs – Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte – were expected to offer apologies lest they be cast out from the franchise with which they were most associated, so why was Sosa expected to grovel? It never made sense to me.”
I basically agree with Calcaterra’s larger point, but even he indulges in some steroid-related nonsense. For example, the idea that some players “had their careers harmed or cut short because they were competing against players who doped” takes for granted that using steroids helps someone get better at baseball. This has never been proven, and despite the widespread acceptance of this fact, there is very little evidence to support it.
As I’ve said over and over again, the home run surge of the 1990s was not caused by steroids. Most of the players who have been caught using steroids are (no offense) scrubs, and most of the GOOD players who were caught using seem to have gotten WORSE after their use began. Ironically, Sammy Sosa is a great example of that last point. His failed test came from the 2003 season, when his OPS fell by 80 points and he was worth only 2.7 WAR.
This connects to my other problem with Calcaterra’s point. He writes that “players who felt compelled to dope against their better judgment in order to survive” are owed an apology. Well, how do we know that Sosa himself is not in that category? Indeed, if we take his apology literally, that seems to be exactly what he is saying: He made “mistakes” because he wanted to recover from injuries, so he took drugs that were banned and probably ineffective. This is likely why most steroid users ended up using steroids.
The steroid era is defined by futile attempts to sort players into Good and Bad categories. Players were dirty or they were clean. They cheated out of a selfish pursuit of money and glory, or they were “compelled to dope against their better judgment.” Such categories are obviously unstable, and we will make arbitrary exceptions for no real reason,1 but it is comforting to sort players into the categories nonetheless.
That really seems to be what the point of this apology is: to validate all the people who had, over the last 20 years, sorted Sosa into the “Bad” category. Even though he hasn’t actually admitted anything, now they can nod their heads solemnly and conclude they were right about him all along.
This is what colors my anger at the moral panic about steroids, even more than my skepticism about the scientific effects of steroids. The treatment of Sammy Sosa makes it quite clear that nobody in baseball is ACTUALLY interested in the truth about steroids. If they were, nobody would be mollified by this kind of non-admission admission. But since the point all along was merely to stigmatize players, and grant owners broad discretion to determine which players are worthy of celebration and which deserve condemnation, then this kind of “confession” is good enough.
Sammy Sosa is just the latest in a line of accused steroid users — Jason Giambi, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, etc. — who are forced to cry uncle: to issue some vague, unspecific admission of “mistakes” that reveal no real details about what drugs were taken, when they were taken, how those drugs may have impacted their bodies and careers, or any of the other details you would want to know if you were actually concerned about the impact of steroids on the game. These statements are like the confessions elicited by the Salem witch trials or the phony confessions extracted under torture: Their existence serves only to justify the excesses of the enforcement regime that produces them.
There are so many rules like this, in baseball and other workplaces and throughout our political system. Rules that only exist to reinforce a certain hierarchy of power, but not to actually solve a problem or root out certain behavior. We all know this, and yet there are times when we have to follow those rules, not because we respect them, but because we can’t fight the people enforcing them. There’s not much reward in it, but the ruling class’ victory is convincing us it is all we can hope for. Sammy Sosa won’t get into the Hall of Fame, or significantly improve his baseball legacy, but now he seems satisfied to get one more standing ovation at Wrigley Field. At some point we all have to “move forward,” because every other direction is closed off.
Your semi-regular reminder that there is just as much evidence that David Ortiz used steroids as there is against Sammy Sosa, but the former was a first ballot Hall of Famer who’s on every FOX baseball broadcast, and the latter was essentially run out of baseball for two decades.