The Extra Dimensions and Earlier Successes of Sammy Sosa

[RandallPnkFloyd]

Yes, Sammy Sosa used performance-enhancing drugs. No, he was not made by them.

Image courtesy of © RVR Photos-Imagn Images

As we approach the end of December, there’s still work to be done for the 2025 Chicago Cubs roster. But it’s hard to label what’s unfolded thus far this winter as anything less than a success. In terms of the current team, you’ve got the addition of the legitimate star the team has lacked for a handful of years. From an organizational standpoint, the resolution to a decades-long dispute with former star Sammy Sosa covers a different portion of the spectrum entirely. 

I’ve long labeled Sammy Sosa as my favorite baseball player of all time. I am a child of the 1990s, so it’s not that hard to figure out. While the standoff between the team and one of its icons probably didn’t need to happen, there’s plenty to reckon with now that he appears set to come back into the organizational fold. Matt Trueblood covered some of these aspects–from Sosa as a questionable teammate to Sosa as a questionable person–in his initial writeup of the news. Given those factors and my proximity to the current state of the Cubs, I have also (somewhat naturally) pushed Sosa down into the very depths of my mind.

But news of his apology and the subsequent invitation to next month’s Cubs Convention had me going down a rabbit hole of sorts. Just as Sosa has been painted with a broad brush in terms of his career narrative in a way that others from the Steroid Era haven’t, this also feeds into some overgeneralization from a purely statistical standpoint. 

My purpose here is to unwind some of that confusion. We have plenty of time to discuss the human components of Sammy Sosa. A dive into the numbers, though, illustrates a very different player than you probably remember, on either side of that 1998 season that turned out to such a hinge between two disparate halves of a career.

The overgeneralization associated with Sosa’s career output lies in the power. The ’98 home run chase and the successive 60-plus home run seasons obviously skew things. He went for 66 in 1998, before rattling off totals of 63, 50, 64, and 49 in the four years after. He rounded out his Cubs career with totals of 40 and 35 in 2003 and 2004, respectively. He hit 545 as a Cub, finishing more than 30 ahead of Ernie Banks in 2,500-ish fewer at-bats. 

It’s the power that we remember, and it’s the power that skews the narrative. Because Sosa wasn’t solely a power guy. His talent was incandescent and irrepressible from a very young age, which is why he was a big-league regular at age 20. However, like most players who came up that young back then, he took a long time to figure out the majors, struggling through multiple seasons with Texas and the White Sox before landing with the Cubs in 1992. It wasn’t until 1993 that the breakout transpired. 

Even in those previous years with the Rangers and Sox, Sosa had flashed dynamic tendencies, both as a power hitter and as a base stealer. In 1990, he hit 15 homers (.171 ISO) and swiped 32 bags. It took another three years before his real breakout manifested, but even then, his first legitimately strong year came in the form of a 30/30 campaign. In 1993, he hit 33 homers and stole 36 bases, finishing among the top 15 in each category. The caveat with that first big year was that he also featured one of the highest K% marks (21.1) and one of the lowest BB% (5.9) among 150 qualifying players. 

In the two years that followed, Sosa went 20/20 and, once again, 30/30. He hit 25 and stole 22 in just 105 games in the strike-shortened 1994 season, before turning in 36 bombs and 34 bags in ’95. He bumped up the on-base dramatically in each year, courtesy of increased batted-ball luck in 1994 and a spike in his walk rate the following season.

It’s that 1995 season that should attract particular interest, though. There is perhaps no point in his career where Sosa was as complete a player as he was that season. An All-Star and Silver Slugger receiving MVP votes, Sosa produced a slash of .268/.340/.500, while finishing with what would be the first of six different 5+ WAR seasons. By that measure, he was one of the 16 best position players in the sport. He followed that with another 5+ WAR campaign in ’96 (in only 124 games), driven by 40-home-run power, before “struggling” to a 36-homer, 22-steal ’97 season. 

From 1990 to 1997, Sosa slashed .257/.309/.473. He hit 203 home runs and stole 192 bases. He ranked 44th out of 424 qualifying position players in fWAR. Given some of the other well-rounded talent that emerged from the 1990s, it’s tough to call him elite in the all-around sense, but there was a very, very good baseball player emerging there. Of course, the years that followed were where things started to get murky, courtesy of the substances he now apologizes for using. 

That doesn’t mean that Sosa didn't do interesting things beyond his power explosion in 1998, however. He and then-Cubs hitting coach Jeff Pentland overhauled his swing ahead of the ’98 season, in order to cover the zone more effectively, cutting strikeouts and giving him the capacity to hit to all fields. The development bore at least some responsibility for his 66-homer campaign that year. Between 1998 and 2001, Sosa’s walk rate increased each year, topping out at over 16 percent in ’01. He was top 10 in hits across the 1998 to 2004 seasons; he became a more complete hitter.

There’s a conversation to be had that isn’t entirely dissimilar to the one we’ve formed around Barry Bonds—that he didn’t even really need the juice. He was already a very good baseball player, even a great one. While it’s obviously not quite to the extent of Bonds’s situation, given the stronger and more sustained prior output on Bonds’s part, the reality is that Sosa wasn’t purely a power hitter. Nor was he only a power hitter because of PEDs. There were multiple tools in his toolbox, and a commitment to the art of hitting that I hope we can realize more now that he’s reentered the Chicago sports zeitgeist. I think those are the conversations that are worth exploring. PEDs have shifted the discussion to the idea that Sosa was overrated or “actually bad.” Either one is, of course, objectively untrue. 

There’s a lot to unpack now that Sammy Sosa is back in the fold. Some of those conversations—especially as we dig into the stuff that isn’t necessarily about on-field performance—are likely to be uncomfortable. Those conversations matter. But we’ll also be talking about Sosa heavily from a statistical perspective. This gives us an opportunity to examine what made Sosa such a force within the Chicago sports landscape. It certainly wasn’t just about the power, or whatever chemicals helped him augment it.

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