Sports Column: So Long Sammy

By Jacob Bressler

The 1999 Chicago Cubs went 65-97.

I vividly remember thousands of fans walking toward the exits in the late innings as Mark Grace came to bat in August of that season.

I unfortunately was not one of those who left – my brother and I worked at Wrigley Field and he was one of those people who felt as if the team still had a chance at The Series when they were 22 games back with a month and a half left in the campaign.

It wasn’t that the fans had to catch an early train or were too dehydrated from drinking eight Old Styles on a 100 degree day.

Cub hero Sammy Sosa had just batted for the last time, and frankly there was nothing more to see on that team.

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Sosa was the unquestioned star and city favorite, not to mention one of the most feared hitters in baseball, one year removed from hitting 66 home runs and leading the Cubs to the Wildcard.

However, that period feels like ages ago now.

Barring disapproval from Commissioner Bud Selig or a failed physical, Sosa will be on his way to Baltimore to play for the Orioles next season.

The Cubbies are not nearly getting equal value from the Orioles for Sosa, and they will end up paying around $12 million of Sosa’s salary next season.

The bottom line though is that the Cubs will be better off without him.

Besides Sosa’s obvious decline in his playing abilities, the former home run king is a selfish, compulsive liar.

I’ll admit that I was once a huge Sosa fan – I owned his jersey, got goose bumps when he sprinted out to right field and yelled at the TV when a commercial exclaimed he was being traded for a side of rice pilaf.

I was one of the early fans of Sammy, waiting in line at Cubs Convention ’94 to get his autograph. Sosa looked a little hunched over that day – probably because he was wearing a 45 pound gold necklace signifying his 30 homer, 30 stolen-base 1993 season.

The truth is, behind all of the good-natured press conferences and joking around is a player who only cares about personal achievements.

As long as Sosa is hitting 50 homers and is the star of the team, winning means nothing to him. This didn’t become clear to me until the 2004 season.

At the start of the 2004 campaign, Sosa was just another name on the roster of what many experts considered to be the best team in baseball. The club had just come off a surprising playoff run that left them one game short of the World Series.

The talk was not about Sosa, but rather about the pitching staff, which had become even more dominant with the free agent signing of future Hall of Famer Greg Maddux.

This irked him to no end. And the acquisition of Nomar Garciaparra in July even further cast Sosa into the abyss of the “bitter superstar on the decline.”

This became painfully evident when Sammy thrust drama into the Cubs’ clubhouse by saying that he didn’t want to be moved down in the batting order.

Sosa wasn’t hitting anything and was once again striking out too much, and failing to knock runners in from third base with less than two outs.

Everybody could see the Cubs would be better off with Sosa batting sixth in the lineup.

However, manager Dusty Baker hesitated because he didn’t want to hurt Sosa’s sensitive feelings about being the club’s “star.” Awwwww.

Last year, Sammy mysteriously decided to alter the batting stance that put him in the top 10 home-run hitters of all time.

It was alarmingly evident that Sosa was standing so far away from the plate that he couldn’t hit a pitch on the outside corner even if he duck-taped a few of pro-wrestler Hacksaw Jim Duggan’s 2 X 4’s together.

Sammy was too selfish to take the advice of his coaches and the media, even if it meant that the team would suffer as a result.

The last straw was the well-documented leaving of Wrigley Field 13 minutes after Greg Maddux’s first pitch of the last game of the season.

The Cubs were already out of contention, yet every other player endured all nine innings. Sammy even had the audacity to lie to the media about when he actually left the park. Thank you for security cameras.

Next season the cameras will hopefully be focused only on team players.