El Profe: Sammy Sosa’s 20 at 20
By Adrian Burgos
Twenty years ago the home runs kept coming for Sammy Sosa. The new hitting approach he developed, featuring a toe tap in preparation for his powerful swing, finally began to take hold. The new approach launched home runs at a record-breaking pace for a month, whether he was playing in the friendly confines of Wrigley Field or on the road.
The 20 home runs Sosa hit in June 1998 set a new major league record for home runs in a month. It also propelled him into the chase for the single-season home run record with Mark McGwire, putting him into the international spotlight.
That summer’s home run race changed baseball, for better or worse. It exposed the willingness of many in the stands, the press box, the clubhouses and front offices to partake in an effort, a charade even, that could revive the circuit that had been pummeled by labor strife.
On the Restrongound
Awareness about the use of Performance Enhancing Drugs was not as widespread then. But it wasn’t an age of innocence. While many people were ignorant about the pervasiveness of PED usage, others ignored the signs that were appearing in front of us all.
Major League Baseball was desperate to recover from the labor troubles that canceled the 1994 World Series. The league and players union had a lot to do to regain the fans who were upset by an unfinished season.
Then in 1998 Sosa and McGwire took us on a ride unlike any ever witnessed. This was different than when Hall of Famer Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris chased Hall of Famer Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a season. This involved baseball’s version of a new American folklore: McGwire as a power-hitting Paul Bunyan, the lumberjack with tree-trunk arms and Sosa, the new immigrant, as John Henry, the African-American folk hero who hammered steel into rock. In essence, two powerful men achieving superhuman feats of questionable truth.
Excitement rose with Sosa’s June barrage, which moved him center stage, alongside McGwire, as legitimate contenders to challenge Maris’s single-season home run record of 61.
The Road to June 1998
At the start of June 1998, Sosa was still aiming to fully realize the promise Texas Rangers scout Omar Minaya saw in the Dominican prospect he signed as a teenager in 1985.
Sosa’s journey had taken a few sharp turns since that signing. Just a month after he made his major league debut on June 18, 1989, at the age of 20, the Rangers sent the young Dominican outfielder to the White Sox as part of a five-player swap that brought Harold Baines to Texas.
The White Sox exercised a little more patience with Sosa. But after less than three seasons on Chicago’s south side, he was sent across town to the Cubs in a March 1992 trade for slugger George Bell.
The two Dominicans’ stock went in opposite directions after that exchange. Bell would not recapture the form that made him the first Dominican to win a Most Valuable Player award in 1987. He was out of baseball after two seasons on the south side.
Sosa seemingly, finally, began to piece it all together. In 1995 he earned his first All-Star selection and hit 36 home runs with 119 RBIs.
Sosa would truly made his mark three years later.
A Month to Rememstronger
Sosa opened June 1998 with two home runs on June 1 against the Florida Marlins. Two days later, he began a streak of home runs in five consecutive games. He homered three times on June 15 against the Brewers’ starting pitcher Cal Eldred. He added five home runs in a three-game series against the Phillies.
The hot streak carried through the rest of the month. He connected his 18th home run of the month on June 24, tying Rudy York’s record for most homers in any month. York’s hot month occurred in August 1937.
Sosa added his 20th on the last day of June.
It wasn’t just the home run blasts that got fans tuning in to watch the Cubs right fielder. It was the panache, the smile and the joy Sosa displayed playing the game.
Highlights of his tear got fans everywhere familiar with the “Sosa hop” that accompanied the long balls.
The hotter Sosa got that June, the more fun he seemed to have on the field and after the games. He was playing to the crowd and turning post-game press conferences into laugh fests with one-liners such as “beisbol has been very, very good to me.”
Sammy was blossoming into the superstar baseball needed. So it seemed.
20/20 in Hindsight
Twenty years is often understood to represent a generation. But 20 years ago seems even further away when it comes to what has transpired in baseball since 1998.
The attitude then was that the home run race was good for baseball. The home runs launched by McGwire, Sosa and others in 1998 and the seasons that followed brought fans back. It revived baseball.
Following the 1998 season, Nike aired a commercial featuring Cy Young award winners and future Hall of Famers Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux. The commercial poked fun at how enamored fans, women fans in this case, were taken with the home run barrage.
Glavine and Maddux put themselves through a grueling workout regimen to improve their hitting. After taking their cuts in batting practice, the pitchers gained the attention of two attractive fans.
“Chicks dig the longball,” Maddux said to Glavine in the one-minute commercial’s penultimate scene.
What was once fodder for an ad campaign’s stereotypical jokes later became the subject of congressional hearings and journalistic investigations that raised questions about the legitimacy of the spectacular performances that had – and were – taking place. Both the ad and the unexamined home run prowess of the two players seem very much of another time.
Players who were once embraced and cheered grew distant from the crowd, some even became unwelcome. Sosa, a man who craved the center of attention, got that attention with an amazing June.
Now, twenty years later, he stands at the center of lingering questions about what was real and legitimate, and how much we were willing to ignore to revive the game we love.
Featured Image: Jeff Haynes / AFP