I Loved Sammy Sosa

The Chicago Cubs long history of honoring legends and fan favorites seem to be missing one guy in particular. In this blog, we are going to talk about the most polarizing superstar in the history of the Chicago Cubs…. Sammy Sosa.

If you grew up a baseball fan in the 90s and 2000s, Sammy Sosa was one of the coolest names in sports. He seemed to be larger than life in Chicago with his towering homers, goofy antics and of course, the greatest homerun race in MLB history. However, Sosa was caught up in plenty of controversies, whether it was steroids or corking his bat; causing him to fall from the grace of being a fan favorite and that still hasn’t changed for a lot of Cubs fans in Chicago, including current Cubs owner Tom Ricketts. Ricketts came out and said in 2018 that Sammy isn’t welcome back to the Cubs until he apologizes.

With all of that being said, polarizing is clearly an understatement. Sammy always came with the Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

(THE GOOD)

Personally, this might be the easiest part of any blog I’ve made. Sammy Sosa is the reason I am a baseball fan so I’m always down for a good ole Sammy hype up.

Let’s start with some hilarious Sammy Stats. If you were to look at the list for most homeruns in a season, you will see Sammy’s name up there a LOT. He is the only player to have not one, not two but THREE seasons with 60+ HRs in a season. What is funny about that fact is that he didn’t lead the league in any of those seasons… McGuire beat him out twice and Barry Bonds’ historic 2003 bested him. However, he did lead the league two other times, once in 2000 with 50 and the other in 2002 when he finished with 49 bombs.

Speaking of bombs, let’s talk about the greatest homerun hitting exhibition these eyes have ever seen. In 2002, the Home Run Derby was in the brand new Miller Park in Milwaukee and Sammy tried to break holes through the back of the stadium every time he swung. He hit SEVEN balls over 500 feet. You heard that right. SEVEN BASEBALLS went from Sammy’s bat and traveled over 500 feet, including a ball that almost hit Bernie the Brewer and measured at 524, still a record to this day. Just for reference, that’s the distance of a 50 story building on its side. He did end up losing to Jason Giambi in the finals, but he still put on the most electrifying show I’ve ever seen. Next time you find yourself at Wrigley North, look up at the slide and the VERY back wall panel and try and comprehend how a baseball can travel that far.

The final thing I want to highlight is Sammy during his peak. In the 5 seasons from 1998 to 2002, THESE were Sammy’s averages per season:

• • • • 157 G

      • 58 HRs

      • 141 RBIs

      • .306 BA

      • 1.046 OPS

Obviously those are insane, but just to put them in perspective, let’s compare them to one of the best seasons we’ve seen in recent history, 2022 Aaron Judge. We all remember Judge broke the AL homerun single season record and won MVP with these stats

• • • • 157 G

      • 62 HRs

      • 131 RBIs

      • .311 BA

      • 1.111 OPS

When you look at them side by side, you realize that Judge’s unbelievable year was not too far ahead from an average peak Sammy Sosa season. We rarely see blog game numbers anymore, but Sammy definitely had blog game numbers (and even his own blog, one of my favorites to this day).

(THE BAD)

If you’re a Sammy Sosa hater, there is a really good chance you will bring up one of these three memories.

First, we can time travel to June 3rd, 2003 when Sammy broke his bat in the first inning in a game against the Devil Rays and revealed that he was using a corked bat. He was immediately tossed from the game and eventually served a 7-game suspension. After the game, he admitted that he knew that bat was corked, but claimed that he only used it in batting practice to give fans a pre-game show and never intended to use it in a game. Major League Baseball confiscated and tested 76 of Sosa's other bats after his ejection; all were found to be clean, with no cork, verifying his batting practice story.

That was not the only controversy in Sammy’s career. After what seemed to be a pretty public uneasy relationship between Sammy and the team, Sosa asked manager Dusty Baker if he could leave the game early and didn’t wait around to be with the team during their final game of the season. The public felt that the slugger put himself over the team, and it didn’t help the fact that was Sammy’s last game in a Cubbies uniform, never really giving a final sendoff or thank you to the city and Cubs fans everywhere.

Finally, controversies followed Sammy into his retirement. Two weeks after he retired in June of 2009, The New York Times reported that Sosa was on a list of players who had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs. This report confirmed what a lot of baseball fans speculated for years, that Sammy Sosa used steroids all these years. This put a black cloud over his legacy in Chicago and all over the baseball world, especially when you realize he appeared in front of the US Congress in 2005 and said, through his lawyer, "To be clear, I have never taken illegal performance-enhancing drugs. I have never injected myself or had anyone inject me with anything. I have not broken the laws of the United States or the laws of the Dominican Republic. I have been tested as recently as 2004, and I am clean." His loophole in this circumstance probably comes from the fact that steroids were legal in the Dominican Republic at the time AND the fact that MLB did not have any penalties for first time failed drug test.

I can’t tell you how many Sammy Sosa arguments in my life have led to the steroid era and it has always rubbed me the wrong way. You know who else was on the same list that was the subject of The NY Times article? Hall of Fame and maybe one of the most lovable players in baseball history, David Ortiz. Now an argument FOR David Ortiz here could be that he played most of his career after the drug testing program was introduced, but the fact that they were both on the list should cloud Ortiz as much as it clouds Sammy.

(THE UGLY truth)

For the record, I don’t give a shit about the steroid era. I guarantee that an endless amount players, both on the pitching AND hitting side, were taking steroids at that time. Also, steroids were not illegal in Major League Baseball at the time. The only slugger that participated fully throughout the countless investigations was Frank Thomas, so he might be the only questionable player from that era that I believe didn’t take them. The rest of the players just weren’t connected to the main investigations. There are several current hall of famers who were involved in PED rumors. Also, if the league was marketing its players for hitting home runs to the moon to help grow their sport, then the league is just as at fault as the players were.

The ugly truth is that drugs have been in baseball for as long as people can remember. In fact, it wasn’t too long ago that Greenies were such a common pre-game supplement that players would start their day off with greenies in their coffee. Mike Schmidt admitted that amphetamines were openly available in every locker room he ever plaid in. At a drug trial in Pittsburgh in 1985, Dale Berra and Dave Parker testified that Willie Stargell and Bill Madlock dispensed greenies to their Pirates teammates. John Milner told the jury that Willie Mays had a bottle of red juice, or liquid amphetamines, in his locker when they played for the Mets.

Drugs have been all over baseball as long as the sport has been around. Guys like Roger Clemens, Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa should be remembered in a much better light than they are. Sure, Sammy was a diva and had a giant ego, but if I went from growing up poor in the DR to hitting the back of Miller Park in front of the whole world, I would also have an ego.

I love you Sammy and I think the Rickets and Cubs fans should welcome him back to Wrigley Field with open arms. Can you imagine the pop we would’ve heard in 2016 if Sammy threw out a first pitch?

Thank you so much for watching. Sammy Sosa is truly my favorite baseball player of all time. He kicked so much ass and even was an American patriot after 9/11. If you don’t agree with anything I said, I respect that. But I also will think you have a big old dump in your pants, respectively.

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