The Whammy of Sammy

The insouciant Sosa cast a spell that helped make a merry man out of McGwire

By Steve Rushin

The most haunting image from the home run chase came on Sept. 1, after Mark McGwire hit two homers in Miami, when cameras cornered their klieg-lit quarry and reporters fired a familiar fusillade of questions. The resulting sound bite was truly biting. The man of the hour had had enough: "All these cameras are in my face, watching my every move. It's like, O.K.! When do I get a break?!" The speaker? Not McGwire but Jason Duncan, who caught one of the Mac Daddy's dingers that night. Jason is 11 years old.

If grade-schoolers grew testy during a single night under the media microscope, you can imagine how McGwire felt. At Wrigley Field in August, after a game in which McGwire hit two home runs and Chicago Cubs outfielder Sammy Sosa hit one, a reporter preemptively apologized to the St. Louis Cardinals first baseman, saying he must have been hearing these same questions since Opening Day. "Actually," responded McGwire, "I've been hearing them since spring training. No, it started over the winter. I'd come home, and these questions would be on my answering machine." And so McGwire, understandably, became cranky on occasion. Leave a message after the bleep.

But a funny thing happened on the way to October. Namely, June. It was in June that Sosa hit 20 home runs, bringing some ballast to the home run race. More importantly Sosa did so while displaying a joie de vivre that had been missing from McGwire's chase. Sammy was yang to McGwire's yin, lover to McGwire's fighter. (How many times did Sosa actually say to TV cameras, "I love you, Mark"?) After home runs, Mac knocked fists with his teammates and pantomimed punching them in the stomach. Sammy kissed his fingertips, patted his heart and flashed peace signs.

Sosa was the tenderizer on this Big Mac. A season that began with McGwire often looking constipated in press conferences ended with him imitating Dr. Leo Buscaglia: After McGwire hit his record-breaking 62nd home run, in St. Louis, Joe Buck of Fox TV opened his postgame interview, bizarrely, by asking the slugger for a hug. McGwire, even more bizarrely, obliged. The following day, in Cincinnati, McGwire was asked in a press conference if he had yet had a chance to "sit down and have a good cry." McGwire responded that he expected to do just that one of these days.

Consider how Babe Ruth would have reacted had he been asked to give a reporter a hug, then whether he would sit down and have a good cry. One suspects the Bambino might have looked puzzled for a moment, then used his bat to pound the interrogator into the turf like a tent stake.

Alas, the Babe never fell under the spell of Señor Sosa, who all summer long said such things as "Every day is a holiday for me," and "My life is kind of like a miracle," and "I love this country—whatever happens to me now, I think it's a gift." Sosa once said his first love was cartoons, and he liked to repeat the Chico Escuela line "Bezball been berry, berry good to me." Truth be told, it was the other way around: Sosa was very, very good to baseball.

He always laughed at his own broken-English jokes, cuing everyone to laugh along with him. In the end, McGwire caught this happy infection, this kind of elating E. coli. On the day he tied Maris, with 61 home runs, McGwire purposely parroted Sosa's favorite line, saying, "God bless America."

The connection is impossible to prove, and Sosa refused to take credit for the change in McGwire's demeanor. The closest he came was to concede that he, Sammy, was more comfortable with the attention, more glib with the press. "Maybe I am a little bit more rico suave than he is," Sosa said one day in September. Twenty-five reporters paused for a split second, pens poised on notepads. Was he serious? Then he started laughing. Immediately, everyone within earshot was laughing along with him.

Issue date: October 7, 1998