Did you know Sammy Sosa was always kind to writers?

Because that's how he remembers it. And oh, by the way, he says he didn't use steroids, so you should vote for him to go into the Hall of Fame someday.

http://chicagosports.chicagotribune.com/sports/baseball/cubs/cs-061111cubssosa,1,5002877.story

 

maybe "everybody" was Mike Kiley?

 

The thing I remember about the McGwire/Sosa chase was either Sammy or the team's wicked witch PR lady refusing to take the postgame to an interview area. So it was a huge cluster around his locker after games, with all the expected problems -- couldn't hear him, TV cameras hogging too much space, players bitching about their locker space being infringed upon (hello, Glenallen Hill) and the wicked witch shutting it all down arbitrarily even though most people never heard a word.

 

This woman would like a word with you for besmirching the good name of witches.



(stupid no good site with defunct pictures of Broom Hilda)

 

I knew Mike Kiley before he was a pandering Cubophile.

 

Am sure Rick Reilly remembers him that way too...

 

That might be the best Reilly column ever.

 

Here it is, from 2002:

It was a simple, straightforward question for Chicago Cubs bomber Sammy Sosa.

"You've said if baseball tests for steroids, you want to be first in line, right?" I asked him last Thursday at his Wrigley Field locker.

"Yes," Sosa replied.

"Well, why wait?" I said.

"What?"

I wrote down the name and phone number of LabCorp, which has a diagnostic test lab in Elmhurst, Ill., 30 minutes from Wrigley. I told him what LabCorp had told me: If any person wants to be tested for steroids, all he has to do is have his physician give a written order and bring in a blood or urine sample. The lab could have the results back within 10 days.

Sosa looked at the piece of paper as if it were a dead rat.

"Why wait to see what the players' association will do?" I continued. "Why not step up right now and be tested? You show everybody you're clean. It'll lift a cloud off you and a cloud off the game. It'll show the fans that all these great numbers you're putting up are real."

Sosa's neck veins started to bulge.

I tried to tell him how important I thought this was. How attendance is headed for the cesspool. A former MVP told SI that 50% of the players are on steroids. The fans are starting to look at every home run record the way people look at Ted Koppel's hair. And there's the threat of a strike. Something good has to happen. What could be more positive than the game's leading home run hitter's proving himself cleaner than Drew Carey's fork?

Sosa looked at me as if I were covered in leeches.

"Why are you telling me to do this?" he said. "You don't tell me what to do."

I tried to explain that I wasn't telling him to do it, I was just wondering if he didn't think it would be a good move for him and the game.

"You're not my father!" he said, starting to yell. "Why do you tell me what to do? Are you trying to get me in trouble?"

I asked how he could get in trouble if he wasn't doing anything wrong.

"I don't need to go nowhere," he growled. "I'll wait for the players' association to decide what to do. If they make that decision [to test], I will be first in line."

But didn't he think a star stepping forward now, without being told to be tested....

"This interview is over!" He started looking around for security. "Over, motherf-----!!"

(Note to young sportswriters: Always make your steroid question your last question.)

The funny thing is, I doubt Sosa is on steroids. He has never missed more than six games in any of the last five seasons. Most nukeheads come apart like Tinkertoy houses.

But plenty of people wonder: Here's a guy who went nine years without ever hitting more than 40 home runs. In the last four seasons he's hit 66, 63, 50 and 64. Here's a guy who was once a skinny, 165-pound, jet-footed Texas Ranger. Now he's a bulky, 230-pound Mr. Olympus.

"This was because of my tooth," he had said earlier in the interview. "When I first came to Texas [in 1989], I had a bad wisdom tooth. The doctor discovered this, and he fixed it. After that, I start to eat much better."

What'd he eat, Fort Worth?

Sosa also explained that the extra muscle and added girth came from feverish weightlifting, not a feverish pharmacist.

"I have a gym in my house [in the Dominican Republic]," he said. "I work out every day, seven days a week. Sometimes at two or three in the morning."

He said the media's suspicions have hurt him. "They think everybody is guilty," he said. "They judge me, but they don't know me."

That's about when I offered up my brilliant public relations maneuver of having himself tested. Soon we were discussing my relationship with my mother.

Maybe Sosa feels he would undermine his union's bargaining power if he had himself tested. But when I asked him if that's why he didn't want to do it, he again mentioned, rather crisply, "You're not my father."

No, but if I were, I'd tell him to get tested. And I'd say it to Barry Bonds and anybody else who says he cares about the game. If they've got nothing to hide, why wait?

True, it would take some large cojones. Of course, if these players are on steroids, they lost those a long time ago.

 

Reilly caught a lot of shit for that column, but I thought it was tremendous...

I covered many aspects of the 1998 home run chase and I must admit that at times I got wrapped up in all of the warm and fuzziness that was going on at the time, largely because of Sosa...

I know writers who are a lot better than I am who feel completely duped for buying into all that bullshit...

I hope Sosa and McGwire never get close to the HOF.

 

Is it weird that the Tribune would send a guy to the Dominican to cover Sammy Sosa's 38th birthday party?

 

Seems like the paper could have been already there for something else. Aramis Ramirez is from Santo Domingo, which is where Sammy lives during some of the offseason (when he's not in Miami), so they could have been chasing a Ramirez story too. Plus, after Sammy said he wants to come back in 2007, I imagine there was some interest in Chicago to see if it was legit.

Sosa was a media darling during the home run chase in 1998, but later in his career, he turned into one of the biggest dicks of all time. And as long as he's still going to stand eight miles off the plate, he's not threatening 600 home runs, even if someone does give him a chance as a part-time DH on '07.

 

Alllllll oooooovvvvvverrrrrr.

No bat speed left.

Laughable.