Chicago White Sox: Frank Thomas was better than Sosa and McGwire
The Chicago White Sox had the best player in the 90s yet Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa are the ones who get all the hype in the media. Frank Thomas was so much better in every way.
The Chicago White Sox had a lot of great players playing for them in the 1990s. There is little doubt that not only was Frank Thomas the best of them, but he was also one of the best players in the world. It was a treat to have Thomas on the White Sox for a very long time. Do you want to know how good of a hitter Frank Thomas was? Well, his numbers were just as good if not better than Mike Trout over the first eight years of their careers.
The strike of 1994 hurt more than just the Chicago White Sox. A lot of people believed that one of them or the Montreal Expos would have won the World Series that year. Well, it was canceled and that really hurt the image of the league. A few years later, in 1998, the home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa brought baseball back to life in the eyes of the world.
They are getting an ESPN “30 for 30” documentary in June that will go over this home run chase. You may remember that Mark McGwire won the race with 70 home runs and Sosa had 66. A lot of people in Chicago were rooting for Sosa but a lot of White Sox fans wanted him to have no part of that record. They are both players who cheated to be that good anyway which annoys most people looking back on that chase.
Frank Thomas was a much better baseball player than both of them and he never was even mentioned in the same breath with steroids. He had a career WAR of 73.8 and walked right into the Hall of Fame. McGwire had a WAR of 62.2 while Sosa was at 58.6. They both had more career home runs than Thomas but neither had a higher WAR and neither is in the Hall of Fame or ever will be. Thomas may have not hit 65+ home runs in 1998 but he hit almost as many consistently throughout his career without cheating.
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Frank Thomas was world’s better than either of those two players at hitting. If he took steroids, he would have hit 100 home runs in 1998. The WAR suggests that he was also just a way better all-around player than either of them. They might be getting the documentary but he is in the Pro Baseball Hall of Fame.