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Must credit The Press-Enterprise of Riverside, Calif.
By GREGG PATTON
The Press-Enterprise
When does 600 not equal 600?
When they are the 600 home runs hit by Sammy Sosa and the 600 that Ken Griffey Jr. is approaching.
Six hundred should be one of those automatic numbers that ensures anyone Hall of Fame election. Not so fast, Sammy.
Texas slugger Sosa hit No. 600 last week, rekindling the debate as to whether he belongs in the Hall.
Griffey is at 584, on pace to reach the milestone before the end of the season. The only debate with Griffey is should his Hall of Fame plaque sport a backward Seattle or Cincinnati cap?
If logic prevails among the voting members of the Baseball Writers Association of America, Sosa will not do his little skip-hop into Cooperstown because he is, more or less, the same guy as Mark McGwire.
The writers rejected McGwire in a big way last winter, based primarily on suspicions that he used steroids to blast a lot of homers in a short period of time. Both McGwire and Sosa appeared before the Senate during its hearings on performance enhancing drugs, and neither did anything to enhance the notion of his cleanliness.
That said, Sosa also displayed, for a large part of his career, a warm and fuzzy side that McGwire did not. And, most importantly, Hall of Fame voters have never displayed a lot of consistency, which leaves plenty of hope for Sosa.
Griffey, for his part, has a squeaky clean reputation, and unless that changes he's a first-ballot lock.
Full disclosure: I am a Hall of Fame voter and I was among the minority who included McGwire on their ballot. The short version of my reasoning is that we don't know enough about this giant iceberg of a problem to keep players with deserving careers out. Baseball _ meaning management and players _ tolerated steroids for at least a decade.
Hall voters shouldn't be responsible for cleaning up the mess through guesswork. Unless there comes proof positive Sosa did steroids, he will get my vote.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
