Everyone has a different way of getting mentally prepared for a game, whether it’s studying videotape, playing cards, watching TV or relaxing with music.
Carlos Zambrano said he likes to take a dip in the whirlpool before starts. Kerry Wood prefers listening to alternative rock groups like Rage Against the Machine or Pearl Jam.
“Whatever works” is the credo most players use. But few players’ routines are as well known as Sammy Sosa’s habit of listening to salsa and rap on his boom box.
After the Sosa trade to Baltimore, whether Sosa’s boom box was innocuous or a distraction was in the ear of the beholder. No one takes credit for destroying it, but no one has denied it was smashed.
“Obviously some people cared about it [last year],” second baseman Todd Walker said. “They should have gone up and said it. He may or may not have turned it off. To my knowledge, no one asked him to.”
In past years, veterans like Joe Girardi, Eric Karros and Damian Miller were among the few with enough clubhouse clout to turn the music down, or off. That tended to occur only when Sosa turned it on and then left the room, as he often did. Nevertheless, the argument over allowing music in the clubhouse has been debated since stereos began popping up profusely in the 1980s. Many teams have an unspoken set of rules regarding it.
“Generally, if you have your own [music], you’re supposed to put headphones on,” Walker said. “Sammy didn’t have it blaring. I didn’t mind. . . . That was way overblown.”
Greg Maddux came from an environment in Atlanta where music was banned in the clubhouse before and after games. Manager Bobby Cox made the rule and players enforced it.
“It’s a manager’s preference, really,” Maddux said.
Cox was a stickler on the issue and one of his former coaches, Ned Yost, adopted the headphones-only rule in Milwaukee when he became the Brewers’ manager last year. Maddux said Cox’s reason for the ban was obvious.
“He didn’t want people’s music forced on him, and he didn’t want to force his music on other people,” Maddux said.
A report last week said the Orioles have decided to ban music in the clubhouse, just in time for Sosa’s arrival. But Jerry Hairston Jr., whom the Cubs acquired in the Sosa deal, said Baltimore manager Lee Mazzilli began enforcing the ban in his first season on the job after coaching for Joe Torre in the Yankees’ headphones-only clubhouse.
“We didn’t have music, so I guess it hasn’t changed any,” Hairston said.
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The Cubs’ home clubhouse was remodeled last year with some flat-screen TVs, though the sound was usually down while the music played. Maddux said the Braves usually had TVs on in the clubhouse with various games from a satellite feed. Sometimes a starter would monitor a team on the TV before or during the game.
“That was your job, to watch the [team] you were facing [next], not the game you were playing sometimes,” he said.
Maddux laughed at the idea the headphones-only rules of teams like the Yankees and Braves have any correlation with their success. He said the Cubs shouldn’t adopt the rule just because the Braves have had it for years.
“Why should the Braves tell the Cubs how to run their team?” Maddux asked. “Why should the Padres tell the Dodgers how to run their clubhouse.”
Though Sosa’s boom box is history, the Cubs still have stereos playing in the workout room and in the shower at Fitch Park. But it’s easy for players to get away from them if they’re not in the mood to listen, or to turn the station to another style of music.
“I think it’s better,” Walker said. “They have the music on here, but it’s way away from everybody. If I want to go turn it off, I can go turn it off and no one is really going to say anything.”