Sammy So-So?

I'd be willing to bet I wasn't the only person who thought Sammy Sosa's 600th homerun last night was somewhat anti-climactic. I was even watching it live on ESPN during one of their cut-ins and I must say it just didn't resonate with me as being a remarkable achievement, which it really is.

In very basic terms, 600 homeruns is the equivalent of hitting 30 a season for 20 years, or 40 a season for 15 years. That is truly remarkable power, sustained over a long period of time, especially considering no current player owns an active streak of even 5 straight years of 40 homeruns (Albert Pujols is going for his 5th straight this year and David Ortiz and Adam Dunn are going for their 4th).

So to hit 600 in a career, you need to play for a long time. And you need to be, either a consistently very good power hitter, or have a few years where you just go berserk. Even though he did have a streak of 6 straight 40 homerun seasons, I think you have to classify Sosa in the latter category considering he hit 40.5% of his career dingers in a four-year-stretch ('98-'01). During that four-year-stretch we saw players post homerun totals of 73, 70, 66, 65, 64, and 63. Before that, it had been 37 years since somebody hit 60, and nobody's done it since.

The other guys in the 600 homerun club are Hank Aaron, Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Willie Mays.

Aaron led the league in homers once in 23 seasons, and never hit more than 45. But he had a 17-year stretch where he hit fewer than 30 just one time. That, to me, places him in the "consistently very good" category.

Bonds is sort of a hybrid of the two classifications. Like Aaron, he had a 15-year stretch where he hit fewer than 30 just once. But like Sosa, 28% of his 748 homeruns came in 5-year stretch ('00-'04).

Ruth is also a hybrid, but a different type than Bonds. He had a 13-year stretch where he hit at least 30 every year but one, and he also had a 14-year stretch where he led the league in homeruns 11 times. The best way to describe his power-hitting career might be "consistently excellent." He didn't have a short spurt where he was off the wall like Bonds and Sosa. His whole career was off the wall. He hit 60 once, 50 3 times, and 40 7 times. And his two most powerful seasons were 6 years apart (59 bombs in '21 and 60 in '27).

As for Mays, he's more of an Aaron type. He led the league just 3 times, his career high in a season was 52, but for 13 years he hit over 30 a total of 11 times.

Maybe it's the fact that Sosa is being overshadowed this year by Bonds' pursuit of Aaron, maybe it's because he came out of retirement presumably just to hit his 600th homerun, maybe it's because Ken Griffey Jr., Manny Ramirez, A-Rod and possibly Jim Thome all have a decent shot at 600 as well, or maybe it's because 2 out of every 5 of Sosa's career homeruns were hit during the so-called steroid era. Either way, this achievement just doesn't resonate with me the way it should.