Turk Wendell, a former Chicago Cubs teammate of Sammy Sosa's, may have nailed it cold. He could understand fellows like the littler shortstops plugging their bats with a little cork for a couple of extra home runs beyond their usual two or three, but why on earth, the relief pitcher wondered to ESPN analyst Jayson Stark, would a Sammy Sosa want a little extra reputed oomph in a bat whose swinger has enough oomph to launch a space shuttle?
But there he was, in the first inning, against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, mired in a post-disabled list slump and whacking a plain grounder to second base. The bat broke with the swing, and so, Wendell feared (and he is not even close to alone in this), did Sosa's reputation.
"Now everything else he's done has question marks around it," said the usually flaky reliever. "His home run records, everything. It's all surrounded by question marks. This is going to haunt him for a long time. No matter what else he does, people are always going to talk about this at-bat - because he got busted for it."
How right might Wendell be? Reality check: Wendell might be an awful lot more right if Sosa had been nailed with the plugged bat after whacking one of those moon shots, or at least one of his patented Waveland Avenue wallbangers. If Sosa had teed off with a three-run homer (the Cubs had men on second and third when Sosa batted) and the bat broke exposing cork, he would get even less benefit of the doubt than he is getting as I write.
Home plate umpire Tim McClelland spotted the bat, showed it to Cubs manager Dusty Baker, and promptly ejected Sosa from the game. Baseball officials ordered all his bats collected for analysis. At this writing, the verdict isn't in yet. Sosa could indeed be right; he could, indeed, have grabbed his batting practice bat by mistake when he went up to hit, as he hastened to say during his mea culpa postgame press conference. He might have no more than two such bats in his armory. He might even have entertained the thought of wheeling the corked lumber in a bid to bust out of his post-DL slump, which would not exactly make it right but would make it at least somewhat understandable.
(An interesting coincidence, McClelland being Sosa's arresting officer. Almost twenty years earlier, it was McClelland who was compelled to nullify an apparent game-winning home run by George Brett, after the Yankees showed him the since-modified rule on how much pine tar was allowable on a bat handle. Brett's teammates and umpire Joe Brinkman had to form the closest thing to a flying wedge to keep Brett from disemboweling McClelland, after Brett charged out of the dugout like a cape buffalo harpooned with an amphetamine dart.)
Reality check number two: Plugging a bat with cork does nothing, really, other than increase bat speed. Turk Wendell's observation aside, an old-fangled light-hitting shortstop who's good for only three homers a year isn't really likely to be good for more than one additional shot at best if he is fool enough to plug, not even if it triples his bat speed. Unless you can get the absolute sweet spot on the ball, and you just so happen to be close enough to a power hitter already, Black and Decker and the top of a bottle of chianti are not going to turn you into Sammy Sosa overnight, if at all.
As a matter of fact, Sammy Sosa himself didn't turn into Sammy Sosa overnight. We should not forget, tempted though we might be, that Sosa made himself into a hitting machine over a long enough period of time, maturing into a well-enough conditioned and disciplined hitter after an early career as a skinny, strikeout-prone overswinger.
At least, we should not forget until the evidence comes in. We might also care not to forget that, if Sosa ends up getting suspended for awhile, it will be hard enough on a Cubs team that - the rest of June pending - is very much in the pennant hunt. If the speculation I have heard holds up and baseball's top cop, Bob Watson, decides to make a real example of Slammin' Sammy, slamming him for something longer than the anticipated eight-to-ten game suspension, it could turn "hard enough" into "rolling the stone up the mountain with only the tip of your nose," in the worst case scenario. Which may explain why, among other things, Cub pitcher Mark Prior got testy quickly at being pumped so heavily about the Sosa situation after the game. (Oh, yes, the game. The Cubs won, 2-1.)
Right now, Sosa is guilty of using one corked bat. Only one. But Bill Madden, a New York Daily News columnist, has already suggested that the four Sosa bats now reposing in the Hall of Fame should be X-rayed under commissioner's orders. Three of those bats hit his 58th, 62nd and 66th in 1998; the fourth sent career number 500 yard. (Just try to picture Bud Selig - whose contortions on behalf of fattening baseball's thrills at the plate could be deemed scandalous enough - ordering Sosa's lumber to the X-ray lab without holding his nose.) If even one of those four bats was corked or otherwise enhanced with anything that might provide a little contraband firepower, real or alleged enough, Madden continued, Slammin' Sammy should be slammed out of the game for life with his home run records redacted from the books.
The uproar tells you something. When one of the game's most genuinely adored players turns up tainted, even after all those years without a shred of suspicion sticking to his name, no matter what the business of baseball has done to fragment the game, the game itself still makes it possible for us to feel the wrench of it when he does.
Once upon a time, Sosa was known among other things for hitting sixty or more homers in three out of five seasons and not leading his league, and for hitting less than sixty in the other two of those seasons to lead his league. How he will be known from now on remains open to very troublesome speculation. "I hope it doesn't get to the point," said another former Sosa teammate, Dan Plesac, also a relief pitcher, to Stark. "where this will tarnish what he's done the last four or five years. But I do know this: He's going to have some splaining to do." And, added Stark, appropriately enough, "it better be the finest 'splaining of his career."
» Jeff Kallman is a writer and editor living in Huntington Beach, California.
Also by Jeff Kallman
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» Dr. Strangeglove; Or, How I Stopped Worrying and Learned To Hit The Bomb: Dick Stuart, RIP
» More submissions
Copyright © 2003 by Jeff Kallman. Posted June 5, 2003.
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