The Tarnish of the Sosa Era

I was thinking the other day about Sammy Sosa, and about his legacy. Which is, I guess you’d say, pretty well screwed. Just a few years ago, such a fall as drastic as Sosa’s has been would have been unthinkable -- at least to me. Now, like many of the fans whose eyes were under the wool, I want to push him into the corner of my memory reserved for things I’d like to forget. There are a few moments I’ll always treasure, but not as much as I would have.



It’s bigger than what I think of Sosa, though. In many ways, that entire Cubs era -- from the strike until 2003 -- is now also full of caveats, and tarnished.

For those 10 years, Sosa was the face of the Cubs, and for some of that time he was very nearly the face of baseball. In 1993 and 1995, his first two seasons with the Cubs other than the strike-shortened 1994 season, Sosa was a 30/30 guy. Do you realize how many of those guys there have been in the NL in the last 5 seasons? Two. That’s it. Bobby Abreu and Vladimir Guerrero. And it’s not like this drought is because of recent strategy changes. After Bobby Bonds did it in 1973, there wasn’t another NL 30/30 guy until Dale Murphy in 1983. For Sosa to do that in both of his first two full seasons with the Cubs was a pretty big deal.

Then, of course, came 1998, which will be remembered by Cubs fans for two things: Sosa’s 66 HRs and the chase with McGwire, and Kerry Wood’s 20 strikeout game and rookie season, when he posted an unfathomable 12.58 Ks / 9 innings at only 21 years of age. At the time, it was the highest mark ever seen. The only two people ever since to post higher numbers are Pedro Martinez (1999, age 27) and Randy Johnson (2001, age 37). While Wood was the dominant rookie phenom, though, Sosa was the veteran in his prime that carried the team into the Wild Card, and it seemed as though all he needed was some decent pitching so that he could single-handedly provide enough runs to win.

I remember the game I was at against the Giants on Friday, August 21, 1998, when Sosa hit his 49th HR of the year, and also stole a base. The Cubs won 6-5, and I thought that he was probably the best hitter in baseball. The Cubs won in the bottom of the 9th, Kerry Wood got a no-decision, and Felix Heredia got the win. Having been living in Michigan, I hadn’t been following the Cubs as closely, but after being at that game I watched them all through the magical run to the Wild Card in September while I was a freshman in college. That game in August is still one of my favorites among the scores of games I’ve attended. I was 17.

In 2001, when play resumed in September after the attacks, Sosa carried the American Flag high with his right hand as he sprinted out to right field, one of the most enduring images ever witnessed in Wrigley Field.

More personal to me, a few weeks later, I was at the game after Arne Harris died, a game that might have been otherwise meaningless, and Sosa held up the sign in the dugout after he hit a homerun: “Arne Harris -- that was for you, Pal.”

Then, in the 2003 NLCS, Sosa hit one of the most impressive homeruns ever in Wrigley, onto the top of the camera well in deep centerfield, as well as the HR onto Waveland in the bottom of the 9th of game 1 to force extra innings.

Those are the sorts of memories that should have been his legacy, and they’re the main reason why I was one of the last to turn on him in 2004. I really held on as long as I could. I wasn’t ready to toss him off the ship that he captained for so long. I felt a sense of loyalty.

Many turned on him with the cork incident in 2003; I felt that it was an awful mistake, but not enough to taint his legacy. For many, though, by that point Sosa was seen as a prima donna, someone who believed himself to be not only bigger than baseball, but larger than life. While it was never cut and dry, or black and white, or good and evil, along the spectrum of shades of grey, they were proven more right than I was.

There were some who never really liked Sosa all that much even while they tolerated him as a superstar. Michael Jordan’s restaurant became Sammy Sosa’s restaurant, but Sosa never became the type of star that MJ did. At least one big reason was that when the time came for the most important shot of the 1992-1993 season, the year the Bulls finished their first 3-peat, Jordan didn’t take the shot. What was probably the biggest shot ever made in Bulls history was made by John Paxson, and Jordan said, “I knew it was in as soon as Pax shot it.” That was the moment that solidified Jordan’s stature because it proved that to even the greatest player who ever played, it was about more than himself, and that's when we knew with certainty that he retired for the first time that fall at his absolute peak.

Sosa never had a moment like that one, and more importantly, looking back, it seems impossible to imagine him having one. He just did not have that je ne sais quois that could have made him elite. Part of me always wanted to attribute it to him, but eventually it becomes less a matter of perception and more a matter of proven. Or, unproven.

So, by the end of 2004, I had seen enough. It wasn’t the steroids. It was the attitude. A game in which getting a hit 3 times out of 10 is considered excellent ought to make any slugger humble, at least in some sliver of his essence. Sosa had lost that sliver.

On the steroids, there will be some who will argue that his homerun numbers aren’t valid because it’s so obvious that he was getting chemical help, but I just don’t know how to cash that one out. There are obviously discrepancies between eras when only certain races were allowed to play, and when players could get away with using steroids, and plenty of other circumstantial factors. It would be wonderful to be able to attribute numbers to these discrepancies, except we can’t. In the end, the numbers are the numbers, and they signify what happened in the games that were played by the players who played them.

In section 9.00 of baseball’s Complete Official Rules, the section “General Instructions to Umpires,” it reads: Keep your eye everlastingly on the ball while it is in play. In the end, what happened to the baseball is all the numbers can show, and what happened to the baseball during Sosa’s years from 1998 to 2003 was an awful lot of homeruns. Regardless of circumstance and context, and fairness aside, the activity of the baseball is what is constant. It will never be fair, but numbers are numbers. It is what it is.

In 1998, did we know that Sosa and others were using steroids? No. Did we suspect? Yes. As a fan, though, what should we have done? Or said? Or felt? Even hindsight is far from 20/20 in this respect.

There is such a thing as the baseball gods, however, and karma's been around a lot longer than Earl Hickey. While steroids promised to make someone better at baseball, they could not promise to make anyone bigger than baseball. That’s why I don’t think the scope of the collapse of Sammy Sosa is owing to karmic retribution for steroids. It’s owing to his attitude that 2004 season, probably the most adverse season in my lifetime, when Sosa lost all sense of the bigger narrative of which he was only an actor.

Who’s to say whether Sosa might have avoided this downfall had the Cubs had better teams in the seasons between 1998 and 2003. Maybe his downfall was not inevitable, or maybe it was. The steroids would have gotten him eventually, but for some of us, he might have yet been able to fade away somewhat gracefully. I’m not suggesting steroids weren’t cheating or weren’t wrong, but many baseball fans’ sense of forgiveness is awful resilient, especially to someone who endeared himself to his team's fans for a decade.

Instead, however, Sosa chose disgrace, and what’s worse is that in a way he disgraced the entire era – 10 long seasons – when he cavalierly thumbed his nose at the Cubs. That was when the betrayal we were feeling became permanent. After all, if the era didn’t mean something more to its captain, how could it still mean as much to the rest of us?