Sammy Sosa's "Sensational" Season Sizzles Celizic's Senses

Now that you're all done saying that three times fast, watch HatGuy redefine the word impressive.

This article's been there for awhile, but it's been revamped with stupidity after the milestone was reached.

Sosa’s comeback juiced with joy for game
Think what you will of slugger, his return to baseball is impressive

I'll make my stance on this clear right of the bat. Sosa coming back to baseball is an impressive personal feat after going out in such a poor/shady fashion. Good for him that he was able to prove himself still able to play Major League Baseball and face up to all the hostility that fans were sure to bring upon him. But there is nothing impressive about his on-field performance.

It’s not the 588 home runs that Sammy Sosa had hit through 2005 that impress me, but the 12 he’s hit this season. Regardless of what you think of the man, what he’s doing is pretty darned amazing.

No. How Roger Clemens has been performing through his 40s is "pretty darned amazing". Sammy Sosa providing a below average bat at a corner outfield position is pretty darned typical for a 38-year-old on a bad team.

After hitting just 14 home runs and falling four points shy of hitting his 225-pound weight for Baltimore two years ago, Sosa packed up his gear and effectively fell off the face of the earth.

Nobody missed him. His reputation was shot, tarred by the popular perception that steroids were responsible for the big numbers he’d put up from 1996-2003, when he hit 408 home runs in eight seasons. His sudden inability to habla Ingles for a Congressional subcommittee holding hearings on steroid use in baseball didn’t help.

And now he’s back, getting booed wherever he goes, but still doing his little happy hop over the plate after he connects and blowing that kiss to the sky. Still enjoying the game.

I promise, it gets bad soon.

He started slowly, but his 12 long balls are tied for second on the Rangers behind Ian Kinsler Teixeira, and his 53 RBIs lead the team.

Do you follow baseball? April was his best month, hitting 7 home runs and slugging .547. How is that starting slowly? If anything, he's cooled off dramatically with only 5 HR since April 27th.

Who's Ian Kinsler Teixeira?

He still strikes out a lot — more than 60 times already — but most teams would love to see him hitting in the fifth spot in the line-up.

Stop. Everything. Did you mean...high school teams? The Kane County Cougars, maybe?

Look, as meh a topic as batting order is, Sammy Sosa's EqA is .254. Below average, and especially so for a right fielder. The only teams with a 5-hole hitter putting up a worse number than that are the Chicago White Sox (Dye), Baltimore Orioles (Huff), Colorado Rockies (Atkins), and Kansas City Royals (Brown/Gordon/Sweeney). Of those teams, two of them have a 5-hole hitter that will probably finish with a better season at the plate than Sosa and one of them hates his guts and would never let him play for them again in a kajillion years. The teams that would love to see Sosa hitting in the fifth spot in the line-up? Mayyyyyyyyyyyyyybe Kansas City. Maybe. So they could sit their young talent on the bench in a desperate attempt to catch the White Sox for 4th place in the Central.

And that’s impressive. It’s impressive that he made the team

749 other major league players did that.

impressive that he’s again one of the best RBI men in the league after quitting the game for a year.

I'd go with VERY fluky. Of the top 10 RBI men in the AL, Sosa's the only one with a SLG below .500, and its not very close between him and the next-worst guy. He's either getting into a ridiculous amount of good RBI spots, or he's gotten so good at CHOOSING when to get his base hits (that's what clutch players do, right?) to the point where he's practically a True Yankee.

But it’s most impressive that he still wants to be a part of a game that didn’t care if it never heard from him again.

It's most impressive to want to be a part of something that is indifferent to you coming back? Well, I suppose my return to playing in a softball league this summer was pretty impressive.......

Sosa didn’t need the abuse that he had to know was going to come his way if he tried to come back this year at the age of 38. He had made plenty of money, and he was comfortable in his native Dominican Republic. There were a lot more reasons not to come back than there were to give it one more shot.

There were just two reasons to do what he did.

The first was to prove he could still play — even with steroid testing.

You mean play......without steroids. And yes, this is probably, in a nutshell, everything impressive about Sosa's return.

(Please, don’t get started about HGH. There is no test for that drug, so you can’t single any one player out as a suspected user. Until there’s a test, everybody’s suspect.)

Hear that David Eckstein? HatGuy's got his eye on you......

The second was that he simply loves the game. And no matter what you think about him, you can’t blow raspberries at that.

I can't WHAT?

This has to be the strangest and most out of place allusion to food I've ever seen.

(edit: reader John pointed out to me that this is an actual expression. Celizic's still obsessed with food though. Sweet food. Whipped cream and raspberries.....mmmmmmm)

Either way, he was taking the risk that he’d fall flat on his face and be subject to even more ridicule. After all, people figured that the reason his performance fell off so precipitously in Baltimore was that baseball had started a more serious testing program. So when he decided to attempt a comeback this year, not many thought he’d be able to make a major league roster, let alone have an impact on a team.

Fair.

He couldn’t even get a major-league contract, just a minor-league deal with the Rangers and a chance to prove himself in spring training. Bernie Williams had been offered a similar deal by the New York Yankees but had too much pride to take it. Sosa took the Rangers’ offer.

There's one sentence in that paragraph that doesn't belong and has nothing to do with anything. (Hint: It's very typical and obligitory of a certain fedora-wearing eastcoastophile.)

You can think what you want about how he hit so many home runs in such a short time. He’s got three 60-home-run seasons, and nobody else in history has more than one. Even Barry Bonds, who holds the record — chemically assisted or otherwise — of 73, never passed 60 again.

OK, I will think what I want. He used steroids and cheated to get those 60-home-run-seasons, making them significantly less impressive.

There was a lot of juice in the game back in 1998 when Sosa and Mark McGwire went toe-to-toe in pursuit of Roger Maris, and it stayed in the game.

Pitchers did it as well as hitters. We still don’t know who did them, and we may never have solid proof of what the prime suspects did, but we can be assured that Sosa, McGwire, Bonds and Jason Giambi weren’t the only ones.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but unless every single pitcher in the league was on steroids as well, Sosa still gets an unfair advantage from using them, yes?

Yet only Sosa had three seasons with 60 or better. Give the guy credit — or give that corked bat he got caught with credit — but admit what he did was awfully impressive. Everyone else had the same advantages he did, but he put up the biggest numbers.

Let me translate:

"Only Sosa had three seasons with 60 or better. Give him credit, or give his cheating credit, but admit what he did (not his cheating, crediting that stopped being an option 5 words ago) was very good and deserving of recognition. Everyone else was corking their bats and on steroids too, but his corky, drugged numbers were the 'biggest'."

He’s not going to hit 60 homers again — now that the testing program is in effect, we’re not going to see many seasons like that from anybody. But he could drive in 100; one thing Sosa could always do was drive in runs.

He’s having fun doing it, too. I’m not sure I like him, but I’m still impressed.

Of course you don't like him. He doesn't wear pinstripes, dummy.

Maybe I'm just blowing raspberries here, but I'm starting to think that the hat is sewn into your scalp and interfering with your ability to not be wrong.