Let’s take a quick stroll around the blogosphere to see how others are reacting to the Sosa news:
Goat Riders of the Apocalypse: I hated the punk BEFORE he even joined the Cubs. I hated him when the White Sox’ GM, Larry Himes (yep, HIM) traded Harold Baines, a friggin’ Sox icon, to Texas for the sideshow fraud. He came up and became a free-swinging whiff machine. Sure, he had speed and power, a strong arm, and obvious filling out to do. Physically, Sosa was a specimen. But his arrogance rubbed his teammates wrong from Day one . . . I’ve known he was a fraud for nearly 20 years, and if the damn corked bat wasn’t enough to convince you, the truth is now out here.
Bugs & Cranks: It’s expected because Sosa’s career progression and statistics smack of performance enhancing drugs; there’s such a dramatic spike in his power later in his career it almost moronic no one though to question Sosa at the time. Sosa’s halfhearted denials and severe drop in performance after baseball began drug testing only amplified the expectation that his superstar turn was aided by the juice.
Deadspin: The real outrage here, as it was with A-Rod, is not who’s on the list but who’s doing the leaking, a story that for obvious reasons The New York Times will not be writing. You’ll remember that those tests results were supposed to be confidential â a perfectly reasonable expectation of any employee who submits to a drug test â yet now they’re trickling into public view, merely because somebody wants to remind you to care deeply about steroids in baseball again.
Bleed Cubbie Blue: We now know, presuming the report on Sosa is true, that the joy [of the 1998 home run race] was indeed stolen from us. The numbers put up were put up by cartoon figures, not baseball players as we had known them for decades earlier. I know, I know, amphetamines in the 50s and 60s, other PEDs, other ways of cheating, ad nauseum . . . we were sold a bill of goods. They all swore up and down that they were honest -- “Flintstone vitamins,” Sammy told us with a straight face. Now we know that face was lying to us, presuming the report is true.
Cant’ Stop the Bleeding: The obvious attempt to demoralize the Cubs on the eve of this year’s North Side/South Side Chicago Civil War Reenactment fools no one, Mr. Obama. It smacks of Cub fan Rod Blagoevich’s fall from the grace as you ascended to the White House. A cheap shot, SIR, and I hope Bobby Jenks gets bitten by a clubhouse rat tonight and Ozzie gets hit on the head by falling concrete in the Wrigley media room.
Baseball Prospectus: I’ve always followed the steroid story as something of an epidemic. It often follows the same models, centering around hubs and nodes. The hubs are players like Jose Canseco or Bill Romanowski in the NFL who were evangelists for the substances, but the nodes are usually the drug distributors. The Bay Area had BALCO, Baltimore had their “star”, and Dallas had their Hollywood connection, while the NFL had doctors in Pittsburgh and Charlotte, among others, who were willing to supply. Chicago, however, doesn’t have this issue or at least hasn’t. Looking at the Cubs roster in 2003 and a year previous, there’s *no one* that tested positive or that has even had much speculation surrounding their production. It will be interesting to see if the 2003 list shows such a cluster existed or if Sosa was one of few singular users.
