The Starting Five: Weiler: Steve Phillips Brings It

Transdermalign patches for everybody!...Steve Phillips and Doug Gottlieb riff on Sosa & steroids.

During Phillips’ exchange with Gottlieb (Greenberg sat mutely through the entire conversation), the former Mets’ GM asked Gottlieb whether he would assume that a player who 39 homeruns one year and 61 the next was cheating. Almost before Philips could finish his sentence, Gottlieb said emphatically “yes.” And, demonstrating that baseball isn’t Gottlieb’s long suit, he didn’t realize that Phillips was, as he then informed Gottlieb, referring to Roger Maris, who hit 39 homers in 1960, 61 in 1961 and never hit more than 33 in a season after that. Phillips also noted that George Foster jumped from 29 to 52 in a season (from 1976 to 1977). Gottlieb did respond that Sosa got dramatically better for several seasons, but it would be an absurd standard of judgment to say that if a player improves dramatically in their late twenties and got bigger in the process,  that is all we need to go on,  to accuse someone of steroid use.

Phillips is not naive and he surely has his own suspicions about who was and who wasn’t using. We all do, however well we can or can’t substantiate those suspicions. But, on every key point Gottlieb made yesterday, he was either flat out wrong on the facts, or was using notably thin arguments. But, unusual for the medium, someone was actually there to call him on it, not with even more shrill hyperbole, but with a superior grasp of the facts and context of the situation.