Last week, Sammy Sosa popped up, like a sheepish groundhog looking for his shadow. Except this Sammy sighting isn’t going to bring us a shorter winter. It’s more like a reminder of how unsettling the spring can be.
The former All-Star outfielder and purveyor of more than 600 career home runs is a pariah in much of the United States. But Sammy remains a legend in the Dominican Republic and the greater Chicago area.
On Thursday, Dec. 19, Sosa issued a statement in which he admitted he “made mistakes” during his playing career.
“There were times I did whatever I could to recover from injuries in an effort to keep my strength up,” the statement read. “In hindsight I made mistakes, and I apologize.”
“We can’t change the past, but the future is bright,” Sosa says in his statement.
The Cubs wasted little time “responding” to the statement, which was clearly orchestrated in conjunction with the team to achieve a reconciliation.
Some observers are critical of Cubs’ owner Tom Ricketts for apparently “demanding” an apology from the former star. But that misses a greater point: the Cubs want to bury this feud, and also benefit from the positive public relations this will get from their fan base.
Make no mistake: Sammy should apologize. He cheated the game. He cheated the fans, he cheated the opposition, and he etched his name into the record books alongside players he has no right to be associated with. But even more than those transgressions (which a few others are also guilty of), Sammy was an unsavory, attention-seeking fraud.
There’s a scheme in the confidence game called “the long con.” It’s a scam that plays out over several days, weeks, or even months. The person who perpetrates the long con is called the “grifter.” Those who are in on it, his accomplices, are called “shills.” The victim is called the “mark,” the “stooge,” or the “rube.”
In this story, the one I will describe in this article, Sammy Sosa is the grifter, Mark McGwire is the shill, and we, the baseball fans, are the stooges.
Sosa earned a quarter of a billion dollars playing baseball. He also made about $60 million from endorsements. He became the face of one of the most beloved franchises in sports, the Chicago Cubs. His home runs were epic: the swing, the giant hop-and-side-skip, the trot around the bags, and the kiss-and-hand shake ritual, which he always made sure to perform to the nearest dugout camera. Sammy was less a baseball player than he was an entertainer, a packaged product.
A lot of those home runs were illegitimate, helped by the best science available to a millionaire. Before the 1990s, only two players had hit as many as 60 home runs, then McGwire did it, and Sammy did it three times in four years. Fifty homers became so yesterday. If you were a slugger, 60 was the new currency. In a ten-year span, Sosa hit 479 home runs. He had only 95 home runs through the age of 25, but he soared past 600 with the skipping, hopping, and finger-kissing.
In 2005 Sammy performed his most heinous con. Seated at a table during a congressional hearing, Sammy suddenly reverted to “happy go lucky Latino who didn’t understand English.” He retreated into a tired stereotype. He denied using steroids. But we later learned Sosa was one of the players who failed a drug test in 2003, the season he hit 40 home runs, reaching the 40+ mark for a sixth straight season.
For years following the end of his career, Sammy simply refused to answer questions about steroids. The guy who couldn’t wait to prance in front of the dugout camera when he was a player, suddenly turned camera shy. He also took his tens of millions and started investing in businesses all over the world, allegedly sheltering some of his earnings from taxes and potentially dealing with nefarious foreign governments. His con made Sammy very, very wealthy.
Mark McGwire has admitted his role in The Great Home Run Con. He’s shed his tears, he’s been welcomed back into the game. for the balance of his life following his gambling scandal, Pete Rose was not permitted in a ballpark unless he got permission, but McGwire was hired multiple times as a hitting coach. That’s not a double standard, that’s a triple or quadruple standard that only Major League Baseball can justify.
Sosa has never admitted using performance enhancing drugs. He’s never had his come-clean moment, his Barbara Walters interview. Instead, Sosa is living large, overseeing a corporate empire, reaping the benefits of his long con. Unlike many pro athletes, Sammy hasn’t squandered his money, instead he’s parlayed his fraud into a conglomerate worth more than a billion, maybe even billions. He maintains homes on three continents, he does business with anyone who will make his pile of cash grow, even suspicious business associates in the middle east. He is without scruples.
In my mind, Sosa is the worst example of what steroids did to the game of baseball. Prior to drinking the McGwire Milk Shakes, Sosa was another corner outfielder with power: maybe 25-30 homer power in a good year, with lots of strikeouts and a .250 average. After he started his con game, Sammy morphed into The Great Sambino. From 1998 to 2002, Sosa had a .649 slugging percentage. Prior to that, in baseball history, only legendary players had ever averaged a .600 slugging percentage. Sosa and McGwire made a mockery of that, and Barry Bonds joined them at the trough.
McGwire feels bad about his indiscretions. Bonds justifies it: unless someone can produce a smoking gun, in his mind his critics are all haters. Bonds is so sociopathic, he actually believes his own lies. But Sammy Sosa has been laughing all the way to the bank.
This week, the Cubs demanded contrition from Sammy. They got it, in the form of a non-admission of guilt. That’s because Sammy is still smitten with the attention he gets from the fans in Chicago. The fans are smitten with Sammy.
Why is a truce happening now between the former slugger and the lovable franchise in the north side? Ownership doesn’t want to answer the same questions every spring as to why their most popular living alumni isn’t in spring training camp. Or explaining why Sammy isn’t at Wrigley Field waving and doing his kissy ritual. That’s tiresome. It’s also good business to appease the fans. Even if they’re in a toxic relationship with a con man.
