Don’t be fooled by Sosa’s image makeover
You cover Chicago sports long enough, you see some things. Hear some things too.
This might have been the strangest: Go back to the summer of 2002. The Cubs are no longer a team, they’re solo artists trying to pile up stats while barely acknowledging a temp manager named Bruce Kimm.
In one corner of the clubhouse, Sammy Sosa plays merengue music. And he plays it loud.
Sosa has hired someone, a poor schnook named Julian Martinez, to carry his boombox from city to city, clubhouse to clubhouse.
Kerry Wood has switched lockers, moving as far away from Sosa as possible. He and Todd Hundley are playing CDs of Pearl Jam, AC/DC and Limp Bizkit on the clubhouse stereo.
Stand halfway between, and it’s like stumbling into Lollapalooza.
Sosa doesn’t care that his teammates resent him.
And what the 95-loss Cubs care about is selling tickets.
If they’d wanted to rein Sosa in, they could have punished him for being the last guy to show up at spring training in 2001. He arrived 12 days after pitchers and catchers did, waltzing into the clubhouse by declaring: “Welcome to my house!”
Some veterans actually left the room.
None of this is to paint Sosa as all bad. Baseball is entertainment, and Sosa was the ultimate showman. Think about the joy he gave fans when he sprinted out to right field to start each game, offering love taps. Or when he homered 17 days after the 9/11 tragedy and carried a mini-American flag around the bases.
He transformed himself from a speedy outfielder with a rocket arm to a legendary slugger with a home-run hop from the batter’s box.
He nearly — but not magically — doubled his homerun rate from 1997 to 1998, quite the accomplishment for a 29-year-old man (or whatever his “birth certificate” said) in the middle of his career.
Sosa was an incredible player and a lousy teammate. The self-proclaimed gladiator was great after wins but would never take the blame for misplaying a fly ball or missing the cutoff man.
And who can forget his comically lame excuse after he got busted for bat-corking in 2003? Oh, that’s right: It was a bat he used during batting practice. Because that’s when you get paid to hit 450-foot bombs.
I write this because if you turn on NBC Sports Chicago, you’ll hear from Sosa that, 10 years after retiring, still has no grasp on reality.
“The (Cubs) ownership, they have to understand that, you know, I’m a humble man,” he said in an interview with David Kaplan.
No, Sammy, you are literally the most egotistical athlete or coach I’ve ever covered.
“Those people that sometimes criticize me, they don’t know me,” Sosa said during the interview. “They don’t put food on my table, you know, and they don’t pay my bills. So when you pay my bills, you have an opportunity to talk about me.”
I’m not paying your bills, Sammy.
And you’re the only one still listening to your music.