Word: sosa
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Mark McGwire70 Sammy Sosa...
Until this year, Sammy Sosa was widely considered to be a Big Creep. The rap was that he was a selfish player, a braggart who couldn't deliver when it counted. Last year, up for a new contract and trying to impress his owners with gaudy numbers, he hit 36 homers but made a mess of it on the way, leading the league in strikeouts, having a worse on-base percentage than some pitchers and being so reckless on the bases that his normally mellow manager had to scream at him in the dugout on live television. His obsession with...
...weird how success affects people. Most of them turn into jerks. But Sosa, 29, got his paycheck and relaxed. He let us see the generous, fun and classy person he is. And he performed. With a league-leading 154 RBIs, a .309 average and the most home runs of any other major leaguer, except Mark McGwire (he had 63 to McGwire's 64 at week's end), has ever hit, Sosa has had one of the best offensive years of any other player, any other time. Most sportswriters think that he'll swipe the MVP award from McGwire and that...
...reason I struck out so much is because I wanted to do everything myself," Sosa told TIME. "Now I am willing to take a walk or a base hit. I'm having a lot of fun in '98 because I'm disciplined, and I learned a lot to be patient." He says he's cut out the late nightclubbing he used to do when he first moved to Chicago. "I used to be kind of wild," he says, until he got married, "six or eight years ago." When you're a baseball player, you've got a lot of numbers...
...Sosa fans were the fans of the underdog; he was black, he was Dominican, and he was pill-free. He had the little body (by comparison) and the big smile. Teddy-bear-on-the-inside or not, McGwire was the hulk. The one with the glower. The one who was supposed to break Maris's record, if you could say that about anyone, and in that way it turned out right. Who but McGwire, after all, could not just pass Maris, not just leave the pesky Sosa behind, but keep piling on the homers until he hit a nice round...