You are quite right. However if you have duplicate keys how do you expect the sort to arrange those lines? Do you fall back to a secondary key, or does it not matter, or do you retain the original file order? You could for example rely on sort's stability in recent versions of Perl to retain the lines with identical keys in file order:
use strict;
use warnings;
print sort {substr ($a, 9, 4) cmp substr ($b, 9, 4)} <DATA>
__DATA__
...
Prints (using the original data):
77809 7211 CA84985 54E
77875 7725 CA84985 54E
77822 7874 CA84985 54E
77873 8003 CA84985 54E
77826 8040 CA84985 54E
77873 8123 CA84985 54E
77819 8503 CA84985 54E
77872 8511 CA84985 54E
77876 8543 CA84985 54E
77884 8543 CA84985 54E
77822 9908 CA84985 54E
DWIM is Perl's answer to Gödel
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