Sammy Sosa
18 February 2009
Just take a look at what Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa’s personal homerun derby did for baseball in 1998. I’d like to think I'd be a better man than all the juicers, but when millions of dollars are suddenly attainable when Player X is hitting 30-40 homeruns when they otherwise would be hitting 15-20 if they didn’t use PEDs, it's a difficult decision. I'm not sure what I'd do in their position, especially when, at the time, there were seemingly no repercussions for their transgressions and one out of every seven players was taking a substance that was even detectable. The pay difference between a guy who hits the aforementioned 30-40 dingers and one who doesn’t is remarkably dissimilar. Of the top-20 highest paid positional players last season, only three (Derek Jeter, Ichiro Suzuki and Rafael Furcal) averaged less than 22 homers per season, and only Carlos Beltran (29), Magglio Ordonez (28), Miguel Tejada (26), Torii Hunter (25) and Bobby Abreu (22) averaged less than 30. There’s certainly something to be said about a player’s homerun total correlating with the amount they get paid.
Posted by Christian Mielcarek | No comments yet
