It's a sad state of affairs for baseball when a player hits a major milestone, one that has been reached by just five players in baseball history, and the first thing that the analysts discuss is whether he is a Hall-of-Famer or not given his alleged steroid use.

The player is of course Sammy Sosa who hit his 600th yesterday.

The begrudged attention paid to this major milestone is a stark contrast to the warm, sloppy kiss and embrace the media and fans gave him when he was setting the records in the late Nineties. This is a player whose trot from the outfield to congratulate and manly hug Mark McGwire on his single-season home run record was replayed as often as Cal Ripken's consecutive game streak victory trot, one or both of which saved baseball, don't you know. The world so adored Sosa they celebrated his second-place finish in homers that year all the way to an undeserved NL MVP and the clear-cut better candidate, Mark McGwire, didn't even seem to care.

Sosa seemed to survive his corked bat incident but somehow a general malaise that surrounded his exit from the Cubs, his sub-par single season in Baltimore, and his one-year forced retirement set in and the world now assumes that he is a poster boy for steroids. It is ironic that his record came the same day that his owner stated his belief that long-time Ranger Juan Gonzalez—another player who won his share of undeserved MVP plaques—used steroids.

The game of baseball is now such a sideshow to rumor mill that ESPN had a web page already in the can and set to go when he hit #600 asking a bunch of their analysts whether Sosa's a Hall of Famer. The results were seven for and one against (Jerry Crasnick). Even so, six of the analysts mentioned steroids even though there is no proof that Sosa ever used them.

Consider that the corked bat that everyone in America witnessed breaking in super slo-mo on national TV is only mentioned by two of the analysts.

Apparently, every home run hitter active in the last ten to fifteen years will simply be labeled a juiced cheater. America, led by Bud Selig and Hank Aaron, is doing it's best to ignore Barry Bonds' chase of the greatest record in sports, the career home run record. McGwire was snubbed at the last Hall Of Fame vote. Plameiro, Gonzalez, Gary Sheffield, they all are tainted. The only recent player with 500 home runs who seems to have evaded the steroid scandal is Ken Griffey, who has been injured for most of the last decade anyway. With a spate of hitters ready to enter the 500-homer club—Frank Thomas (497), A-Rod (491), Manny Being Manny Ramirez (481), Jim Thome (481), Sheffield (472)—possibly as early as this year, doubling the number of steroid-era members, one has to wonder how much further the reputation of today's power hitter will debased.

For the record, I am by no means a Sammy Sosa fan. I always thought he was greatly overrated. However, there can be no Hall of Fame without him.

A few years back Don Sutton seemed to be barred from the Hall even though he won 300 games because he had the temerity to be a pitcher representative of his era. Sutton pitched in a five-man rotation and would not always finish his games. Looking at Sutton's numbers today, it seems ludicrous that any of these things were ever mentioned. Sutton amassed 200 innings twenty times in his 23-year career, with a career-high of 293.1 in 1969. Of the three season he missed 200 innings, one was a strike year (1981), one he missed by just 8.1 innings (1987), and the third was his last season (1988) when he was 43 and lasted just 16 starts. I have to think that history is going to look back on all this tempest in a teapot talk about various players and their unfounded steroid use in a similar way.

It really gets to the attitude held by baseball purists that hitting 600 homers today is not what it was in Ruth's or May's or Aaron's day, which is the truth, but why should we devalue what a player accomplishes simply because he gets a little help. We can remove the era-bias and measure how all players outperformed expectations.

I took the annual league average for homer per plate appearance and determined for each player in history given his plate appearances how much he exceeded expectation. Below are the players who out-homered their eras the most over their entire careers (stats through yesterday):

Note that Sosa is eleventh even though he is fifth in career homers. I'm not crazy that he is slightly ahead of Ted Williams but I think overall it represents the players' home run prowess a bit better than career homers alone. And as far as Sosa, steroid era or no, he has to go in the Hall of Fame.

At the other end of the spectrum, here are the players who underachieved the most in their careers as home run hitters—Viva Vizquel!: