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Baseball Primer Newsblog — The Best News Links from the Baseball Newsstand Sunday, January 08, 2012NY Times: Kepner: At the Hall of Fame, Forgetting History and Perhaps Repeating It
bobm
Posted: January 08, 2012 at 04:53 PM | 13 comment(s)
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1. Walt Davis Posted: January 08, 2012 at 07:11 PM (#4031844)And of course there really is no "evidence" against Sosa. The NY Times made it a habit to call around to people who'd seen the list to try to get them to name names. Quite a while later, they claim to have finally found more than one person to say Sosa was on it. To my knowledge, no media member has ever seen the actual list. And of course the Times hid the sources so nobody except the Times reporter knows the quality of the witnesses.
As far as I know, no dealer ever accused Sosa; no mistress ever accused Sosa; he's not in the Mitchell Report; the closest I recall a player coming to accusing him was Grace and Canseco both saying the equivalent of "c'mon look at the guy"; he categorically denied (in English despite what wacko sportswriters like to say) usage in front of Congress and nobody's brought perjury charges against him.
Sosa having used steroids would surprise nobody but the "evidence" against him is barely above Bagwell levels.
Pardon?
nope, Sosa was a name listed on a NYTimes article saying he was one of the names.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/sports/baseball/17doping.html
Was this claim ever refuted or is this the extent of the evidence against Sosa?
Also, Curt Schilling shouldn't be a tier below Smoltz and Hoffman. Either bump him up or knock them down. Actually, it might be best to put the three of them into a separate "Probable" category in between the virtual locks and the possibilities.
never refuted, never confirmed either, and never spoken of again since this was the entire case against Sosa.
I think he'll go in, but not in 2016. I suspect he'll get 50-60% of the vote that year. Fingers got 66% in his first year, Gossage 33%, Sutter 24%. Fingers still held the saves record after the 1990 season.
It's unfortunate that Kepner is so muted about the unsubstantiated nature of the "suspicion" concerning Bagwell and Piazza. He is very wan in terms of protesting the current mind-set, and while he's not all that influential amongst his peers, this lack of combativeness regarding the effect of spurious rumors is particularly disappointing.
I'm not sure Smoltz will go first ballot but he might get Eck'd.
It's unfortunate that Kepner is so muted
That's kinda what I meant about it being all over the place but your description might be better. It's like he's doing his best to not "offend" either side. And it ends on a whimper -- "the HoF won't properly represent the era but ... hey."
I suppose it's OK in that it brings the piece closer to "reporting" than "opinion" -- not "taking sides" just reporting the "facts" but in the end that serves the same purpose as supporting the status quo and if you're going to do that, just say so.
The evidence for many voters are the 600+ home runs. No way Sammy Sosa could hit that many homers without cheating. That should be sacred ground. On a similar note I think missing out on milestone numbers are going to help Jeff Bagwell and Mike Piazza when he gets on the ballot.
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/baseball/news/2003/06/03/sosa_ejected_ap/
Sosa's excuse here always struck me as a massive load of BS. You got your bats mixed up? I don't believe that for a second. The nature of the modern whip-handle bat makes me a *little* skeptical that he was corking up for so long - he had to know that eventually a bat would break - but it's still possible, and to me corking his bats makes a better narrative for Sosa's career than ROIDS anyway. When Sosa was a crap player, he was crap because he swung at everything. A lighter bat with the same surface area might have allowed him to not swing through at so many pitches, making him more selective, and in turn increasing his already pretty decent power.
Or it could have been both, although I agree that you do need better evidence of "he got big, he had a weird career arc, he hit a lot of HRs, and he's a known cheater". I personally would not hold that against Sosa. The bats? I can understand how for some writers, given the dearth of information that is known about folks during this time compared to what we want to know, this is enough evidence to keep him off their ballots for now.
The bat thing though is another issue. I'd be inclined to say "hey hey it's just part of the game Norm Cash and all that" but then I do kind of wonder what the real difference in terms of fairness is between ROIDS and doing this (or spitting on baseballs, or stealing signs, etc.).
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