CHICAGO — Former Boston Red Sox designated hitter David Ortiz was the only player on the 2022 Baseball Hall of Fame ballot to be elected by the Baseball Writers’ Association of America.
Congrats to “Big Papi,” a larger-than-life player who made it in his first year of eligibility, garnering 77.9% of the vote by the BBWAA, surpassing the 75% threshold necessary for election.
Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens were near misses on their final ballot, getting 66% and 65.2% respectively, while Curt Schilling — who asked writers not to vote for him after being denied entrance last year — wound up with 58.6% in his last chance to get in via the BBWAA vote.
Another PED-tainted star, Alex Rodriguez, got only 34.3% in his first year of eligibility, while former Chicago White Sox pitcher Mark Buehrle received 5.8% — just above the 5% threshold to remain on next year’s ballot.
And then there’s Sammy Sosa, the former Chicago Cubs great who hit 609 career home runs and had three seasons of 60-plus homers but never received more than 18.5% of the vote.
As Sosa leaves the Hall of Fame ballot forever, it’s necessary to remember why he never got close enough even to dream of being inducted.
Unlike Bonds, who also will be permanently removed from the ballot after failing to reach the 75% threshold in his 10th and final season of eligibility, Sosa was deemed an above-average hitter who suddenly became a superstar in 1998 after allegedly taking performance-enhancing drugs. Bonds already was a superstar and on his way to the Hall of Fame when he allegedly began using PEDs in the early 2000s.
That’s why Sosa received 12.5% of the votes on his first ballot in 2013, dropped as low as 6.6% in 2015 and then climbed back to 17% in 2021, his highest voting percentage before this year. While Bonds has been relatively close, coming in at 61.8% last year, he never was close enough to have a real shot.
So the two sluggers will go out together along with another tainted superstar in Clemens, ending a chapter in Hall of Fame history and setting up the possibility of one or more getting in via a future veterans committee vote.
Bonds and Clemens knew they risked entrance to the Hall of Fame if they were caught cheating. Sosa never had a chance until he allegedly began cheating. Life is full of moral dilemmas. You make your choices and you have to live with them.
My guess is Bonds and Clemens eventually will get in, though it probably will take 20 or more years before a veterans committee of former players and executives and BBWAA members consists of enough Generation X voters who don’t believe steroid usage should be a deal breaker in Hall of Fame eligibility. Certainly they’ll have a better chance than they had with us Baby Boomers.
The first chance for Sosa, Bonds, Clemens and Schilling will come in December during the winter meetings in San Diego, where the BBWAA’s Historical Overview Committee is scheduled to meet to decide the ballot for the Today’s Game Era Committee.
That doesn’t mean Sosa will get in. Obviously he has been held to a different standard than Bonds and Clemens based on the fact Sosa’s career numbers before he allegedly began juicing were nowhere close to Hall of Fame-worthy. That won’t change no matter what generation dominates the electorate.
Sosa’s best chance to get to Cooperstown might be if the Hall takes the advice of comedian Roy Wood Jr., who offered a solution Tuesday for handling the PEDs issue in all sports.
“Every sport should have a Steroid Hall of Fame next to their regular Hall of Fame,” Wood tweeted. “Problem solved.”
Sosa, of course, never has admitted to using PEDS, which is the main reason he remains persona non grata with the Cubs owners, the Ricketts family. He has been out of sight and out of mind for more than a decade in Chicago.
One of the few times Sosa addressed the steroid rumors was in a 2006 interview with the Chicago Tribune in his native Dominican Republic. Sosa told former Tribune reporter Fred Mitchell that day: “I am clean, and I have always been clean. There has been a lot of speculation, but they don’t have no evidence. So you take it from there. They haven’t been writing a book about me doing this or doing that.”
Asked about the prolific numbers he suddenly started compiling, Sosa credited going to bed early and believing in God.
“Everyone is surprised because … I hit 60 (homers) three times,” he told Mitchell. “I put up the numbers I have been putting. But you know what? I put up those numbers by going to bed at 9 o’clock at night in Chicago because I have to play a day game every day at 1 o’clock. I prepared myself for that.”
He then credited those famous Wrigley Field winds, saying: “When the wind is blowing out, nobody can stop the ball.”
Since Sosa’s final year in Chicago in 2004, the only Cubs with 39 or more home runs in a season were Derrek Lee (46 in 2005) and Kris Bryant (39 in 2016). Both players got their sleep.
Back in the summer of 1998, when Sosa and Mark McGwire engaged in the home run race that supposedly saved baseball after fan disenchantment over the 1994 strike, the first blemish on an otherwise rosy picture appeared when McGwire had to defend himself for using androstenedione, an over-the-counter testosterone booster marketed as a dietary supplement. Years later it would be reclassified as an anabolic steroid.
Many in baseball sprang to McGwire’s defense, including Sosa, who said “a lot of people are looking for negative stuff to say about us” because of the race to break Roger Maris’ single-season record of 61 home runs.
While he offered sympathy to McGwire that August day in Denver, Sosa added: “But this is a free country. There’s nothing you can do about it.”
That’s still true today. There’s nothing Sosa can do about the writers’ snub.
That afternoon, Cubs manager Jim Riggleman was asked if Sosa would undergo the same kind of scrutiny McGwire had if Sosa approached Maris’ mark.
“I don’t know what else you could bring up,” Riggleman replied. “He knows the challenges he’s going to be facing every day by pitchers are much tougher than any challenge by any writer.”
That may have been the case in 1998. But in the long run, the baseball writers became the toughest challenge Sosa ever faced.
