A marketing suggestion for the Cubs. Instead of raising the “W” or “L” banner on the center-field flagpole, the club might instead just run up Sammy Sosa’s home run total at the end of the day.
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Or better yet, put Roger Maris’ 61 at the top and run Sammy up one side and Mark McGwire up the other for the rest of the season. And they had better hurry, because McGwire is climbing fast.
Does the outside world care about anything else?
“We are fighting for the playoffs,” Sosa said.
Oh, that. And not doing a bad job of it either.
There will be Sosa Days, So-Sosa Days and No-Sosa Days. This was one of the latter.
“We’ll use Sammy’s bat tomorrow,” said Cubs manager Jim Riggleman.
The circus did not leave town with McGwire and the Cardinals. It just got a little smaller and a lot more vital.
The Cardinals were essentially photo ops. See Sammy hugging Mark. See them chat at first base. They like each other. They really like each other.
Now this is consequential baseball. Full of Sosa’s precious playoff implications and all of that. The Giants are compound nuisances and the Astros are due in next. If the Cubs are going to leave San Francisco behind or catch Houston, this would be a good time to start.
“We have got to beat everybody,” Mark Grace said, putting a sum to it.
And if that is to happen, the Cubs will need to have more games where someone besides Sosa pulls the wild-card wagon.
“Sammy has carried us too much of this year,” Riggleman said. “We know he can’t do it every day. That’s when others have to chip in.”
Sosa now has 35 games in which to hit 14 more home runs. Of those games, only 15 are at home, where Sosa has hit 26 of his 48 home runs.
In the road stadiums ahead, Sosa has hit five home runs this season, and none at Coors Field, where the ball flies like a feather in prop wash. Sosa gets the last four games of August at altitude.
Conventional wisdom has been that if he or McGwire cannot get into September within 10 of Maris, the record is safe. McGwire is already there. Your serve, Sammy.
Thursday’s game would be lost in the season heap, the No-Sosa pile–Sosa was 0 for 5 with three strikeouts, flopping twice with two Cubs on base–except for the Air Show fighter planes buzzing the field (“I thought we were at Shea,” Riggleman said) and the first appearance for Gary Gaetti, who made the Cubs’ last out of the eighth on a swinging strike.
And there was the lyrical connection of Glenallen Hill to Julian Tavarez.
This has to the first time in baseball history that a winery has hit a pinch grand slam off a cigar.
“I bat .333 coming off the bench,” Hill said. “So I’m confident.”
The Cubs’ middling relief–I mean, middle relief–managed not to waste Hill’s game-turner. If the good news was Hill gave the Cubs a three-run lead, the bad news was he did it with four innings left to play.
Terry Adams, first out of the bullpen, is one of those cover-charge relievers. He gets a two-walk minimum.
Cubs relief pitching is not quite like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates. True, you never know what you are going to get, but getting to closer Rod Beck is more like feeling around on the floor of a movie theater for loose change. Whatever you get is more likely going to be disgusting.
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“We know we have to get outs from our bullpen,” Riggleman said.
Let’s just say that the sequence of Adams to Heredia to Karchner is not likely to become a classic Cubs jingle.
Said Grace: “Sandy Koufax once told me how he faced Willie Mays. He said you don’t beat one player, you beat a lineup. And we’re not too bad, top to bottom.”
That may sound a little too Jerry Krausian to nourish the romance of Sosa’s quest, but that does not make it untrue.
“All we have to do is play Cubs baseball,” said Hill.
Oh, Lord, let’s hope not.