The Turmoil of a Cubs Fan (Why McGwire should have won the 1998 NL MVP)

Three decades after hippies took the streets of San Francisco, the real of Summer of Love took place. There weren’t any Mamas & Papas concerts, the air wasn’t perfumed with the smell of the devil’s lettuce and ball caps replaced the flowers in everyone’s hair, but love was undoubtedly rekindled.  This was a time in which hormone filled behemoths roamed over diamonds, slamming clubs into spherical conglomerations of leather, cork and string. The American people loved their pastime again. Every saloon and speakeasy was littered with names Sosa and McGwire, as if there was bound to be a fight outside between an Irishman and Dominican. The rumors were true, there was a fight, just not outside your local pub, but instead across the National League.

Two men took a sledgehammer to one of baseball’s holiest records, one that had stood for 36 years, the single season homerun record. Which has as you baseball historians might know, had its day in the sun back in 1961. The post war posterchild for Americana, Mickey Mantle, versus the small town reigning MVP, Roger Maris. Well Sosa v. McGwire was like Mantle v. Maris, but this time Sosa and McGwire had stolen some of Popeye’s special spinach.

In 1961, Roger Maris broke Babe Ruth’s homerun record by a singular slam. The sportswriters foolishly awarded the man who won the homerun race with an MVP. Though Mantle hit 48 points higher in terms of batting average, and blew Maris out of the water in OPS, Maris had a .993, while Mantle had a 1.135. Mantle had Maris beat by almost 40 points in OPS+, 167 compared to 206. WAR? I bet you can guess who was did better? That’s right, the womanizing centerfielder, who looked like the American spirit had manifested himself, by nearly four wins, Mantle with 10.5 against Maris spouting a 6.9.

In 1998, the voters learned from their mistakes and just didn’t give the award to the man who just broke the record. Mark McGwire hit 70 homeruns, but Sosa got 30 of 32 first place votes. They looked deeper this time. Of course, by deeper I mean they just looked at the back of their baseball cards. In the triple-crown categories, Sosa beat out McGwire in batting average and RBIs. So if you’re a casual watcher of the sport, you would say “Sure, give it to Sosa.” Yet, if you’re paid to watch the game and analyze it (I’m looking at you BBWAA) you should be better at making the judgment call on who deserves the hardware.

Slammin’ Sammy Sosa, is as synonymous with my childhood as Pokémon, Yu-gi-oh and Batman (I was dope.) He was my idol, and my favorite professional baseball player growing up. His 609 career homeruns come to mind quicker than my birthdate and social security number. To this day, I swear that he hit a homerun every game I saw him play in person, which trust me, I pestered my dad to go see him play A LOT. One summer, while in Florida for my brothers’ baseball tournament I begged my dad to drive from Orlando to Tampa, just too see a post artificial hormone Slammin’ Sammy struggle. And let me tell you that advocating for a Cardinal over a Cubbie has caused some serious inter-turmoil, but you have to give credit where it is due, and Big Mac had a better season in 1998.

So let’s put on our thick glasses and get into nerd-ville, and look at some of those Bill Jamesian numbers that those writers, like myself, are using to ruin the game of baseball as we know it. WAR isn’t a perfect stat, but it does keep things nice and neat into one number that can interpreted as value.  Big Mac had a 7.5 WAR, Sosa had 6.4. OPS+? Edge goes to McGwire, 216 to 160. McGwire had 134 less at-bats than Sosa that year. If he kept the same pace that he had and had as many at-bats then he would have hit 88 homeruns (this is clearly because McGwire walked more, it’s fun regardless.) But this isn’t about hypotheticals, this is about what happened. And what happen was the ‘roided up Mark McGwire had one of the best hitting seasons in history. Because behind OPS, the best way to interpret a hitters success is how much did he effect his team’s chances of winning. You know those funny looking win probability charts, there is a stat that determines how much you effect those, because this is baseball and stats are fun. The stat is called Win Probability Added, WPA. The stat can only go back to 1938, since it needs more than just box scores to be calculated. Mark McGwire’s 1998 is the second best hitting season (behind Willie McCovey’s 1969) since a Charlie Chaplin fan-boy had a Napoleon complex.

Oh well. You can’t blame the sport writers too much, it’s not their fault they didn’t accept Sabermetrics, yet. After all ’98 was the year before Brad Pitt starred in Fight Club, not Moneyball. Just maybe it would be wise to keep up on the trends and ideologies of the sport you’re covering. The thing is no one cares anymore because, I’m not sure I mentioned it yet, but these two were taking steroids. And we like to be Men in Black’ed when it comes to this time in baseball.

Brian Kenny’s Ahead of the Curve dives deeper into this voting atrocity, though he does a much better job than myself. The book is heroin, and if you appreciate baseball you should read it. Though I warn you, if you a baseball traditionalist you might find reading it is like being a conservative at a Bernie Sanders rally.

#MLB #SammySosa