You may not be interested in baseball, and even if you are, you may wonder why I'm giving so much thought to a declining and not particularly well-liked player like Sammy. Still, as a diehard Cubs fan, I want to put ongoing subjects aside (again) and take a moment to say goodbye to Sammy. Well, actually I don’t want to say goodbye to Sammy—‘tho I’m not sorry to see him go. It’s more along the lines of a feeling of obligation. Which is stupid.
For those of us living here in Chicago, there really isn’t hell much to say about Sammy that hasn’t already been said. Some people still love him. Some people hate his guts. I don’t love him or hate him. Now. I have had my moments on either side of the coin. Which is stupid.
Like a lot of people, I did love Sammy. In a way, he was a personal hero, which I didn’t realize at the time and which surprises me as I write this. I loved the stupid little hop he did when he hit one in the air. I loved the way he waved at the crowd when he ran out onto the field. And I knew my feelings were based on atavistic bubblegum silliness, but I couldn’t help but get caught up in them. Which was stupid.
It took a long time for my feelings toward Sammy to curdle. Some people’s feelings did so more quickly. Others still believe. I’m somewhere in the middle. Truth be told, Sammy just makes me sad, and he doesn’t even do that so much anymore. I didn’t watch him blunder through the senate hearings on steroid use in baseball, and I was neither pissed nor amused when his ability to speak English suddenly atrophied. Which was, of course, a stupid and obvious copout.
Speaking of atrophy, seen Mark McGwire lately? A lotta people have said that the homerun race between him & Sammy healed wounds caused by the 1994-95 player’s strike. The spectators were more than a little brassed off that they’d not only lost a World Series, but had their faces rubbed in the conglomerated scorn of the Major League Baseball biz. But here in the light of goodwill were two guys competing for a historical marker. Lotsa dingers were hit, and lotsa gosh-shucks speeches were made. Here were these two humble, but incredibly talented fellas striving for excellence within a great historical human endeavor. At least, that’s how it was presented to the public. Which was stupid.
Naturally, idiotically sentimental baseball fans like me fell for it. We do every time. We’re the same people who thought that Sammy’s big friendly grin—the visual equivalent of a friendly Labrador lickin’ your face—meant that he was a good guy. Which was stupid.
Baseball, like any other commercial endeavor, functions most effectively when you can put a face on it. And in Chicago, that face was Sammy’s. We loved the ’98 Cubs for making the post-season. We recognized the fact that it was a team effort, but Sammy was our leader. He wore the shirt w/ the big team captain’s C on it, didn’t he? And while that was almost poisonously unfair to the other players and the management, it did make it more fun—more old-timey. We fooled ourselves into thinking we had a hero. Which was stupid.
Stupid, but understandable. By ’03, when we got really close, Sammy was on slightly shakier ground. There were rumblings in the clubhouse—rumored tantrums & other prima-donnisms. The C hadn’t changed to a symbol for “cancer.” Yet. But Sammy was lookin’ a little less lovable. The C continued to haunt him, and us, in the form of a corked bat and its attendant accusations of cheating. But he was still our not-so-secret-weapon. When he went to the plate, you saw the other guys really sweat. He gave us what we wanted, but if we hadn’t’ve been so close, I’m not so sure we would’ve all been so forgiving. Which was stupid.
Then Sammy got stupid. During the 2004 season, he camped out on the disabled list with one ailment following another, and some of them seeming potentially disingenuous. (Sneezing fer chrissakes!) This was all going on while Sammy was in a slump at the plate. He was swinging at every goddamn thing in sight, which was a symptom of the offensive disease that seemed to be plaguing the entire team. It was ugly. We’d gotten so close the year before. Some of the people who’d loved him were already calling him a pussy. They were booing him every time he struck out, and that just seemed to cause him to retreat even more. Was he hiding on the disabled list? If so, that was stupid.
(Now I’m starting to sound like Jeff Foxworthy or maybe more like one of those obnoxious speeches people make at political conventions. Which is really, really stupid.)
There were more rumors. You heard that Sammy basically told the other team members that he couldn’t carry their weight. They needed to get off their asses. But you never heard Sammy say anything like that in public. Then Dusty Baker told the press that Sammy’d done a really modest thing: Recognizing that his struggles were hurting the team, he’d volunteered to take a lower slot in the batting order. Not long after this, Sammy complained in an interview w/ the Hoy! newspaper that he hadn’t been consulted about the change. He created this discrepancy that nobody could ignore. Which (you guessed it) wasn’t very smart.
We’d been so close. It had been so long. And now we were so close to being close. Injuries had fucked us up, but down the stretch, we had a shot. It was pissed away. In fact, there was a whole lotta pissin’ goin’ on. The fans were pissed at the team, the management, the owners, and or each other. The team was pissed at the fans, the media and each other. The management was pissed at the team, the fans and the media. And everybody, to the extent that they gave him a thought now, was pissed at Sammy. Which was stupid.
One guy doesn’t piss away a shot at the championship. One guy can’t even cause a world war. (Surprisingly, I just heard that Hitler had some help!) All we were doing was turning him into a scape… uh, well, never mind… Anyway, when Sammy was off the DL, everybody bitched about his performance. When he was on it, everybody bitched about him deserting his team. Which was stupid.
Actually, some people pointed out the absurdity of these circumstances. Some of them were calm, rationale spirits who, to their credit, refused to get caught up in the hate. They looked at things as they really were. Others, who were reminiscent of Elvis fans, still loved Sammy blindly. They ignored the cork. They ignored the fact that the rumors were confirmed—Sammy did throw tantrums. He’d practically do it on camera, if you asked him to. They still loved him. Even now, when the friendly grin was a thing of the past. When Sammy seemed less like a cheerful Labrador and more and more like a yippy little terrier that snaps at everything in sight. Which was stupid. And sad.
Because now Sammy was pissed at the media, the management, and his fans. All of them. I’m not sure if he knew or cared that some of them still loved him, or if he stopped to think about why those who no longer loved him had stopped. Which was stupid.
Oh yeah, and Sammy was pissed at his teammates. The clubhouse atmosphere was even uglier, you heard. Now people were talking about a “clubhouse cancer,” and that C on Sammy’s jersey was starting to sorta look like a Scarlet Letter. You heard that he was throwing more tantrums, making more accusations that the other guys weren’t doing their part. As though the endeavor that they weren’t supporting was him, not the team. You heard that he wasn’t showing up for team exercises or meetings. When Sammy skipped out of the last game of the season and then lied about it, well, rumors stopped being rumors. It was almost like he wanted to get caught. Which was stupid.
Or maybe not. We wanted to get rid of Sammy, & he wanted to get rid of us. He came up with a quick fix, and people were almost grateful. At the very least, no one was mad. No one was surprised. We were relieved. It was like one of those awful romantic relationships that just won’t fucking end. Thanks to Sammy, it did. He provided the last nail in the coffin of something he and the fans had built together: a sand castle phantasm. A pretty comic book picture of a guy who never existed. And I’m guessing it hurt Sammy as much as the rest of us to find out that this guy didn’t exist and never had.
I’m not saying that a human being named Sammy Sosa doesn’t live and breathe. That, obviously, would be stupid. I’m saying that Sammy Sosa was a guy like any other. It’s such an obvious dumbass cliché: an incredibly talented person is, in the end, just a person. And people want to be loved and to be cool. Those are human constants and always have been. Go read Beowulf, where the ass-kickin’ hero is right upfront about the fact that he’s in it for the glory. (And the money.) These people get seduced by alla that bright lights, big city yammery that you’ve heard about 5719 times before. So I won’t bore you or insult your intelligence any further by restating it.
Baseball is just one arena for the acting out of another human constant: we need people to whom we can look up. We put ‘em on pedestals, and they tear ‘em down for us, and we all enjoy every minute of it. We both love and hate ‘em when they spit on us from above and we revel in the sight of the smug bastards falling on their faces and humiliating themselves. And they have similarly schizoid feelings toward us. Everyone gets hurt in the process. We all lose something. So why the hell do we do it?
A lot of people say they don’t do it, but I think they’re lying. I have no proof, but when someone tells me it’s just a game, or just a business, or just the way things are, I think they’re trying to convince themselves of something they want to believe. It’s easier. You don’t get hurt that way. But you do get older. Which is unavoidable.
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