A home run Monday, a home run Tuesday, a home run Wednesday, two hits Thursday, two home runs Friday, a five-hit day Saturday (with two more home runs).
He has 20 hits in his last 37 times at bat.
Alfonso Soriano esta ardiendo.
The guy is on fire.
“He’s electric,” Cubs pitcher Ryan Dempster said. “When he gets like this, he’s like the heat from the surface of the sun.”
“It’s a joke,” pitcher Sean Gallagher added. “The ball must look like a beach ball to him. You just watch him and wonder, ‘OK, what’s he going to do next?'”
“For me, this is nothing new,” teammate Daryle Ward insisted.
It’s not?
“No, I’ve seen him like this,” Ward said a few lockers down from Soriano’s. “I’ve seen him hit 10 or 15 balls out in a month.
“During the time he was in a slump, I kept telling everybody, ‘Watch out, because when this guy gets hot, he is one of the hottest hitters you’ll ever see.’ Home runs, doubles, line drives, balls off the wall. His slugging percentage just goes through the roof.”
Soriano is like Chicago … it takes him a while to heat up.
“I told him, ‘I don’t know why you don’t just wait to play till it gets warm,'” Ward joked.
Even after a 7-6 loss, the scorching Soriano was the talk of Wrigley Field’s largest crowd of the season, 41,686.
Including the ones in the left-field bleachers who bent at the waist and did those “we are not worthy” salaams with their arms each time he trotted out to left field.
Some of whom were the same ones who verbally abused him 10 days ago when the Cubs returned to town.
“I play for them,” Soriano said quietly at his locker Saturday after a mob around him cleared. “I want to play great for them because I know it means so much to them.”
Did those boos of a week ago disappoint him? Make him mad?
“No, no, no,” Soriano said. “That is the game.”
He came home May 8 from a hard trip to St. Louis and Cincinnati with a bottom-feeding batting average of .188
He had just come back May 1 from the disabled list but was having a hard time at the plate and in the field.
People said he shouldn’t lead off, that he was hurting the Cubs with his impatience and wild swings of the bat.
People said he shouldn’t be left in left field in the late innings, that he was hurting the team with his glove.
People brought up that $136 million contract of his and asked when the Cubs were going to get their money’s worth, even though last September he practically carried the team on his shoulders to the playoffs.
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People, they’re such know-it-alls.
“Some people think he’s a dumb hitter,” Cubs pitcher Carlos Zambrano said. “He’s not. He’s a smart hitter. At the beginning, some people were booing him. Everybody in baseball can go through a slump. Superstars do what Soriano is doing right now. Good for him. I say good for him.”
Here is what Soriano is doing, for those of you keeping score at home:
Batting average: .295. He has raised it 107 points since this Cubs homestand began May 9.
Home runs: 10. No one in the American League went into Saturday’s play with more.
RBIs: 25. Not bad for a leadoff man, eh? Soriano is now fourth on the Cubs in this category … and the guy spent two weeks on the DL.
A week ago, some of the Bleacher Bums treated him like a bum.
Now he could be an All-Star. Now you are going to hear “SOR-e-ON-o” from these fans the way you do “FU-ku-DO-may” and “Lee! Lee! Lee!”
Reporters are asking him pressing questions now, like: “How hot are you?”
Surface-of-the-sun hot, that’s how hot. Dempster is right.
He was asked a while ago if his leg still hurt. Or about those balls in St. Louis he misplayed. Or how frustrating it was to have a batting average so low.
Now he gets asked how it feels to be hitting the way he is hitting.
“Oh, man,” the soft- spoken Soriano said. “It makes me feel I want to get the most at-bats I can.”
This is why the guy makes the big bucks. This is why the Cubs paid through the nose for him. This is the way he played for all of last September, even though some people can’t seem to remember anything else except his three bad nights in October.
Soriano is suddenly Sammy Sosa without the finger kissing and chest thumps.
He has seven home runs in his last six games.
He is a one-man Chicago fire.
It could be Daryle Ward is right. Don’t make the guy play when it’s cold. Keep him under wraps until mid-May. It was worth waiting for, this.
Hot stuff
Alfonso Soriano has raised his batting average 107 points from .188 during the Cubs’ homestand.
%% DATE, OPP. AB R H 2B HR RBI AVG
May 9, Ari 4 0 1 1 0 1 .191
May 10, Ari 5 2 4 1 0 1 .223
May 11, Ari-* 0 0 0 0 0 0 .223
Monday, SD 5 2 2 1 1 2 .232
Tuesday, SD 4 1 2 0 1 1 .243
Wed., SD 5 1 2 0 1 3 .250
Thursday, SD 5 1 2 0 0 0 .257
Friday, Pit 4 2 2 0 2 4 .265
Saturday, Pit 5 3 5 1 2 3 .295
TOTALS 37 12 20 4 7 15 .541
*-walked as pinch-hitter; AVG.-season average after each game %%
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