I believe that I've eaten crow, or humble pie, or whatever you're supposed to eat when you're admitting that you were wrong, at least once in regard to Sammy Sosa, but I suppose that I have yet another meal or two coming.
You see, after the 1997 season, I wrote a column in which I argued that Sosa was greatly overrated. I even made up a new nickname for him: "Sammy So-so." Of course, all Sosa did in 1998 was hit 66 home runs and win the MVP Award in something of a landslide. Sammy So-so, indeed.
What could cause such a gross error on my part? A couple of things; one of them excusable, one of them not so excusable.
First, the not so excusable ... I made a classic error in my evaluation when I placed a greater weight on the just-ended season than on Sosa's recent career.
Age OBP Slug
1994 25 .339 .545
1995 26 .340 .500
1996 27 .323 .564
1997 28 .300 .480
After that last season I happily exclaimed, "A-ha! See, I told you that Sammy's inability to control the strike zone would get him in trouble." I saw what I wanted to see, while ignoring the three previous good -- not great, but very good -- seasons. Sosa wasn't the great player that everyone told me he was, and so I didn't give him credit for being the good player that he actually was.
All that said, there simply wasn't any good reason to think that Sammy Sosa would, at the relatively advanced age of 29, become one of baseball's biggest stars. Haven't you wondered how that happened? As it happened, a couple of weeks ago I was poking around in a bookstore and ran across a copy of "Sosa: An Autobiography," ghostwritten by Marcos Breton and published last year. Most books like this aren't what you'd call scintillating reads, and this one was no exception. Still, for the low, low, LOW price of six dollars, I thought I might find an answer to that question. How did Sosa jump from 36 home runs and 36 unintentional walks one season, to 66 and 59 the next?
Well, in midseason 1997 Jeff Pentland joined the Cubs as hitting coach. As Pentland says in Sosa's book,
The two things that really stood out were [Sosa's] attitude and his aggressiveness. He is about as aggressive a person as I've ever been around. I've always felt as a coach that the more more aggressive the player is, the better, because it's your job as a teacher to harness that aggression to where it's productive. At that point Sammy was aggressive, but he was wildly aggressive.
And there was no direction or control of that aggression. His holes in his swing were off the plate -- you could get him to chase balls. In other words, he was lacking in his ability to read pitches, which I think is critical. Obviously, the guys who do it best are the best hitters in the game: Barry Bonds, Gary Sheffield, and Jeff Bagwell. Those guys have tremendous ability to identify pitches when they are batting.
My memory of Sammy Sosa from all those pre-1998 seasons boils down to one thing: Sosa striking out upon taking a mighty cut at a slider a foot outside and bouncing in the dirt. Now, it's one thing for a hitting coach to recognize a hitter's deficiencies; it's a far rarer thing for a hitter himself to recognize his deficiencies, and possess both the desire and ability to significantly improve.
But at the close of the 1997 season, Sosa had just signed a fat new contract and he had suffered through a sub-par (for him) season, and the combination just might have been exactly what he needed. Well, that and Jeff Pentland, who says, "The important thing about hitting is that it's like opening up a flower. When it's there and the petals are all folded in, you don't know how beautiful it might be. What I made Sammy aware of was that there was a lot of finesse and softness in hitting."
But again, Sosa himself had to want to change, and by all accounts he did. "In spring training of that year," Sosa remembered, "when Jeff Pentland and I would meet daily to discuss hitting, we set out many goals because we thought it could be a special season. So we talked a lot about me taking more walks. We talked about me hitting the ball to the opposite field. ... We talked technique. We talked game strategies and identifying the pitches. We talked about my footwork, where I held the bat, how I held the bat, how I swung the bat. ... But going into that season, Jeff and I never -- ever -- talked about home runs. ... Home runs were the furthest thing from my mind."
Specifically, Pentland reconstructed Sosa's swing. Sosa dropped his arms, and changed his footwork to include a revised "tap step," and the result was, as Pentland says, "that Sammy would begin to use his legs better than anybody in the big leagues. ... Sammy was learning that power was actually more coordination and timing than brute strength."
And of course, Sammy Sosa went out and hit 66 home runs. He's been just about as good every season since, and is quite likely on his way to the Hall of Fame.
Not everybody can do what Sosa has done, though. Remember Raul Mondesi? In April and May, just having turned 30, Mondesi put on a real show; in 53 games, he scored 40 runs, drove in 33, and drew 42 walks. The Blue Jays were playing well, and Mondesi -- "the Buffalo" -- earned himself a feature in Sports Illustrated.
And since then? In 67 games, Mondesi's scored 36 runs, driven in 35 ... and drawn 25 walks. He's still on pace for a solid season, but it's a Raul Mondesi season rather than a superstar season.
Rob Neyer's column runs Monday through Thursday. He can be reached at rob.neyer@dig.com.
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