Sports outlook 6/22

Sunday, June 22, 2003

It has become a media obsession to overstate matters of small importance. A recent example would be the national frenzy over Hillary Clinton's book. The salivating media made it so she wouldn't have to send out the usual number of promotional copies so the prose of her ghostwriters could be fawned over. They crawled over one another in an attempt to be the first one to ask her some meaningful question. But something else happened that has overshadowed even this bit of overblown poofery. Had Sammy Sosa been surly as was Albert Belle, the corked bat episode would have been treated as was Belle's. With little mention. You would think Sosa was caught stealing from a church, or attempting to rekindle the Chicago fire. At least on the surface. But ever since that bat exploded, exposing cork, Sosa has been attacked, villified, crucified and everything 'else-afied.' I haven't seen such heart-rending baseball prose since "Say it ain't so, Joe," way back in 1920. You would think Sammy had run into the Wrigley Field grandstand and personally ripped the heart out of every single Cubbie lover. My first thought was, who is perfect? Well, I've read about this one person who was perfect and he added to his perfection by saying, "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone." Hey, the rocks have been bouncing off Sosa's head in the form of editorial comment from coast-to-coast with machine gun-like rapidity. Finally, I got some insight while reading the Sunday Forum section in the June 8 Kansas City Star. Skip Bayless of the San Jose Mercury News wrote this about Sammy. "While many fans, through the Great Home Run Race of 1998, were conned into seeing Sammy as this heart-tap-kissing, bunny-hopping buddy and rival of Mark McGwire's, the sly-eyed guy I often heard about or observed off-camera was a profane bully with highly questionable integrity." Hmm! After reading that it occurred to me that those who know him were all too ready to tear Sammy down. On the other hand, those who don't know Sammy were taking the same tack as those who did know him, except for other reasons. This group felt as though they had been cheated by a friend. One pundit wrote, "We can never feel the same about Sosa again." Speak for yourself. I feel the same about him as ever. First and foremost, I'm not a Cub fan. I do watch the Cubs and have to admit that if I'm half-heartedly watching one of their games on WGN, I will stop doing something distracting and watch Sosa bat because I enjoy watching him. He's a fine hitter, cork or no. And from what I've seen of Sosa's home runs, they flew far enough out of the park that the cork didn't do a great deal. If the bat was corked. Any Royals fan should be able to remember the most famous bat corker on the team was none other than No. 26, A.O. (Amos Otis) himself. Of course, those of us who knew Otie would have been surprised if he hadn't corked his bats. It was kind of like Gaylord Perry and the spitball. There are quite a few people in my profession who beat their breasts and act as though something horrible has happened when a player is caught doing something that violates the rules. They scream, "Cheating." But players don't look upon it as cheating. They call it getting an edge. And when you are making a living -- and a very good living at that -- playing the game, you will grab an edge any way you can.If corking bats has helped Sosa, and aI seriously doubt that it has, there can be no doubt that steroids have helped Barry Bonds. Take a close look at him. He's as puffed up as some of those floats in the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade. But, Sammy do something wrong? He smiles too easily and waves too broadly. Here is living proof that nice guys don't finish last. Sure, it's easy to picture Bonds doing steroids. He's surly. Not Sammy, though. His grin is too infectuous. Frankly, I hope this will soon blow over. What it all boils down to is the fact that if a guy as big as Sosa meets the ball solidly, it will fly a long ways just as it has more than 500 times in his career. No cork is going to provide the edge needed to hit more than 60 home runs three times in a career even if it is a lot easier to do than it once was. The jackrabbit is in the ball, not the bat. All the writers asked Sammy about it and he gave them the same lame answer. At least they asked him. You have to give sportswriters some credit for asking correct questions. If they were interviewing Hillary maybe they would ask her something other than how she obviously felt about her husband's affair. Like maybe something about the Rose Law Firm billing records. I guess we become sportswriters because we like hardball.

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