In this Sept. 18, 2002, file photo Cubs’ Sammy Sosa warms up in the on-deck circle during the Cubs’ baseball game against the New York Mets in New York. The Cubs and Sosa appear to have reconciled. The question is will anyone care?
AP
The last time I saw Sammy Sosa, I explained to him what the word “skeptic” means. It means doubt, I said, suspicion, distrust.
I had asked if he had returned to baseball to prove the skeptics wrong. Sosa looked up from the autograph he was signing. He frowned.
This was in spring training in appropriately named Surprise, Arizona, a surprise because there Sosa was in a Texas uniform, a year after he had left baseball.
This was Sosa’s last stab at redemption. The Cubs had since been discarded. He had spent a year in limbo. He was a nonroster invitee at a rookie’s salary, his fame still of value enough for nine pages in the Rangers’ media guide.
Sosa’s English was always as useful as he needed it to be. I tried another tack. A skeptic, I say, is someone who thinks you can’t hit any more.
“Your skeptics can watch,” he said.
That’s just it. The skeptics stopped watching, the Cubs did too, Hall of Fame voters, old teammates. Sosa simply did not matter. He was without defenders, unimportant in the way Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens have continued to be, or Alex Rodriquez. Sosa became the outcast of the outcasts, a lost page in baseball’s case book.
Old clubs welcomed back Bonds and Clemens and Mark McGwire and others of the era when baseball cheered their feats and ignored the reasons. The Cubs simply disowned Sosa.
The 1998 home run race between Sosa and McGwire resurrected baseball from the labor wallow and the lost World Series of 1994. It was welcomed as validation of America’s pastime, compelling and thrilling at the time and only later discredited as if it were an intentional fraud on the honest affections of fans.
For his part, Sosa got a ticker tape parade and the key to New York City, presented by mayor Rudolph Guliani, irony obviously having no shelf life.
Maybe no athlete has gone from glory to irrelevance faster than Sosa, (well, maybe Lance Armstrong, but that’s another column). Much of it was Sosa’s fault for sure, but also baseball’s as well, there being mutual mistrust, forgiveness ungiven and unwelcome. And now…
…Welcome back, Sammy.
We shall see how this goes, or even if anyone still cares. The Cubs are willing to bend and Sosa is willing to be bent, and Cub fans may wonder what difference any of it makes.
The Sosa of memory was something, PED-ed very likely, though Sosa still has not outright admitted to doing anything wrong. A hint is as good as a confession.
“I made mistakes and I apologize,” Sosa said in a statement.
Good enough for Cubs chairman Tom Ricketts. “Thanks for reaching out,” said Ricketts in a statement.
Now, can we get on with admitting that Sosa was worth those summers of wonder when No. 21 would step into the batter’s box, carefully scrape away the back line with his right foot, squirm his cleats until he was comfortable and flick the bat with insolence, ready to do harm.
There was menace there and when the ball sailed out of Wrigley Field, Sosa would skip out of the batters box, the chest thump and the heart kisses seemingly meant for every Cub fan.
“We can’t change the past, but the future is bright. In my heart I’ve always been a Cub,” Sosa said in his statement.
“Nobody is perfect,” said Ricketts in a statement.
Ah, nothing like the reconciliation of old lovers. Why did we ever break up?
Without argument the most beloved Cub is Ernie Banks but the greatest Cub was Sosa, no one else close, not Ryne Sandberg, Ferguson Jenkins nor Andre Dawson.
If Sosa tarnished his legacy with an ugly exit from Chicago, indifferent stopovers in Baltimore and Texas and a guilt by association appearance before Congress, a new generation does not care.
He was one of the most famous baseball players alive, and if his fame came with an unwanted curiosity, about steroids, about corked bats, about a general sourness that followed so many summers of clear joy, none of that will change.
A skeptic remembers it all.