A vote for Sammy Sosa is a vote for joy, a vote for fun, a vote for old-fashioned good cheer and, just maybe, a vote for chewable cartoon vitamins. No one ever need apologize for voting for Sammy Sosa.
Yet the astonishing and disappointing thing about Sosa winning Most Valuable Player in the National League is the margin of the victory. So great is it–30 of 32 first-place votes–that it clearly seems as much an insult to Mark McGwire as it does an endorsement of Sosa.
If McGwire had beaten Sosa by the same margin in the home run race as Sosa defeated him for the good opinion of strangers, McGwire would have 990 homers instead of 70. This was not just a difference of opinion about two of the greatest seasons in baseball, this was a clear recommendation of one over the other. Every voter but the two in St. Louis preferred Sosa. Was Sosa really that nice to that many people?
“I been nice to everybody,” Sosa said. “I been the same human being, the same guy. People know I have a good heart.”
Hitting 66 home runs certainly made the choice easier. And as I recall all the schmaltz and heart-tugging of the Great Home Run Race, I’m positive that more of McGwire’s good heart leaked out into his tears than did Sosa’s.
There is a rejection in there of McGwire that cannot be ignored. And cannot be excused. Was it the steroid supplements? Was it McGwire’s hulking, massive body, appearing to be so much more un-human than Sosa’s? Was it McGwire’s generally patronizing, if not always surly, way of dealing with the attention he caused?
It was probably all of those. And still it is hard to believe that the man who owns baseball’s most cherished record could be so overwhelmed by such a Sosa landslide.
“The way I conduct myself,” Sosa said, “maybe people respect me that little bit more.”
Sosa doesn’t have to explain the motives of others, the baseball writers who voted him the most signficant honor in his league. Nor does he have to set his conduct against McGwire’s as the preferred model. But clearly Sosa knows what the rest of us know: Sosa is easier to like than McGwire.
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The greatest single achievement in the history of baseball is what it is. McGwire’s 70 home runs do not need to be further authenticated by postseason trinkets. And McGwire was selected player of the year in a Sporting News poll of players, so it isn’t as if anyone wants McGwire to stand in the corner with his thumb in his ear.
McGwire cannot be what he isn’t any more than Sosa can be a different person from who he is. Sosa said Thursday that if he hits only 10 home runs next year, he will be the same person as the one who hit 66.
This is just the right thing to say, the Sammy thing to say, and Sosa may even believe it to be true. But if Sosa hits only 10 home runs next year, not all the good cheer in the world will save him from the storm of cynicism that will come.
“This is something that don’t happen every day,” Sosa said of his honor.
That is just exactly the point. Sosa deserved the tribute, but McGwire did not merit the rejection, so that one of the most extraordinary and riveting interludes in baseball, when two men chased a legendary record with an ardent sense of the quest and a genuine affection and appreciation for one another, seems now to have been judged badly by pettiness.
I will say that Sosa was my most valuable guy all along, although I had no vote in the matter. What cinched it for me was Sosa giving the mayor of New York a bogus bat.
Way to go, Sammy, I thought. While you were at it you should have given Rudy Giuliani the deed to the Water Tower, the only original, authentic (heh, heh) recipe for deep-dish pizza and a lifetime pass on the Waukegan Ferry.
Here we were feeling guilty for not giving Sosa a parade as New York did and Sammy had his own his own little hustle going, getting even for anyone from the Midwest who ever bought the Brooklyn Bridge.
If you’ve got any more of those No. 66 bats left, Sammy, you can send one to a real estate weasel I know in Port St. Lucie, Fla.
I wouldn’t think of asking McGwire.