Click above for the full cringe-inducing video.

I’m not sure where this rumor got started, but over the past two decades people out there have been claiming that baseball isn’t a contact sport like football, basketball, or hockey.  Hearing someone claim this gets pretty much the same reaction out of me as someone who claims that global warming doesn’t exist: I get angry and flustered, and my head fills with so many talking points at once that I can’t choose one and then end up sounding just as ignorant as the person I’m trying to enlighten.  So I decided to preempt anyone making that argument to me by breaking it down for them once and for all.

For those of you who didn’t see it, the Padres’ Edgar Gonzalez (brother of Adrian) go hit in the back of the head with a 93 mph fastball over the weekend.  The impact kept him in the hospital for 3 days with dizziness and ringing in his ears.  I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that his batting helmet saved his life.  This has happened before.  I remember Sammy Sosa having his helmet shattered by a fastball in 2003, which he claimed saved his life. There was also the case of Adam Greenberg, who saw exactly one major league pitch in his career before it was ended when that pitch hit him in the head in 2005.  When asked about it two years later, the pitcher who hit Greenberg, Valerio de los Santos, said “Going down the way he went, the first thing going through your mind is ‘This guy’s dead.’”

The team doctor compared his crushed eye socket to the disintegration of an egg shell.

I could go on to mention all of the come-backers that have hit pitchers in the head and altered their careers, like of Kaz Ishii.  I could mention Juan Encarnacion, who is now mostly blind in his left eye after being hit by a foul ball while waiting on deck.  I could mention Ray Chapman, who died from a pitch to the head in the days before batting helmets, or Doc Powers, who died from injuries sustained from a collision with a wall while chasing a pop-up.  I could bring up any number of injury-inducing collisions at the plate, in the outfield, into walls, into the stands, or taking out a guy on the base-paths.  I could mention the signs in every Major League ballpark that warn fans to watch for flying objects, a bit of advice that might save their lives should a foul ball or thrown bat come careening towards them.  I could even direct you to a book that counts the 850 deaths resulting from baseball as of 2007.

I could site any number of instances to prove my point, but the essence is this:

baseball is a sport that consists of someone hurling an object with lethal force at men who are wielding clubs and intend to swing them violently, followed by that ball traveling in an undetermined direction with deadly force while people run around at top speed towards either other people or towards solid walls, all with little regard for their own personal safety.  Every time the ball is thrown or hit, every time someone runs into a wall or another player, there exists the potential for either serious injury, or even death.  Football and hockey might be violent more often, but the the extent of the violence in baseball is greater than any sport on Earth.  So if you’re one of those people that likes to claim that baseball isn’t a contact sport, this is your turn to get all angry and flustered trying to think of a response.

Try telling Aaron Rowand that this isn't a contact sport.

Sosa holds the record for most 60+ home runs seasons (3), most homers in one month (20), most homers in a 4 year span (243), and ended his career 5th all-time in homers with a whopping 609.  The question I have always asked myself and others in looking at his career is: Was Sammy just doing more drugs than everyone else, or was he really that much more talented?

For the sake of this debate (with myself), I’m going to ignore the corked bat since we’re not sure how long he was using it, while it’s pretty safe to say that Sosa was on steroids from 1998-2003.  Seeing as Sosa had already been a member of the 30-30 club twice, had hit 40 homers in a season, and hit .300 for a season before that time frame, it would be stupid to say that what he did in his career was purely due to the drugs he was taking and had nothing to do with natural athletic ability.  A good way to measure this is to compare him to his contemporaries.  Though Mark McGwire could out-slug Sammy, he never had the speed and quickness that Sammy did, which accounts for both his base stealing and Sammy’s higher batting average.  If not for his chronic back problems, McGwire may well have surpassed Sosa’s total home runs and seasons with 60+, but the average and speed were never there.  When compared to Bonds, Sosa ends up having more seasons with staggering home run totals, but not more overall.  This is likely due to Bonds not starting on PEDs until getting jealous of McGwire and Sosa after the 1998 or 1999 seasons.  Though both were 5 tool players, Bonds tools were always better than Sosa’s, and would have ended up with more homers, a higher average, more gold gloves, and more steals no matter how many drugs either of them did.

Nobody else who used in that era, be it ARod, Giambi, Sheffield, Piazza, or any number of other players, slugged as many homers as Sammy, or did it as long as he did.  If Sosa had been using more ‘roids than the rest, why did he not suffer the injuries that are a hallmark of using such as tendon or ligament tearing?  Yes, he once threw out his back sneezing, which is laughably suspicious.  But unusual injuries can happen to anyone.  In the end, we are left with two nagging questions: Why did he hit so many more home runs than anyone else?  And why was he able to do it for so much longer than anyone else?  I think the only answer can be found in Sosa’s final season.  In 2007, Sammy returned to the Rangers after taking the entire 2006 season off.  His final numbers that season were 21 homers, 91 RBI, and a .253 AVG in only 114 games at the age of 37.  If he had played 150+ games, he easily could have hit 30 homers and driven in 100 runs.  At age 37.  After a year away from baseball.

In the end, the answer to my question is: a little bit of both.  Sosa did use steroids to a large effect.  But he really was as talented as the best players of his era, all of whom (save for a select few like Griffey, Jr. and Frank Thomas) were on PEDs.