Sosa’s Selection as MVP Ends Terrific Season

When Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire were deadlocked with 66 homers, McGwire said it would be “the perfect ending” if they ended up in a tie.

Actually, all things considered, the perfect ending was for McGwire to hit four home runs in the last two games of the season for a total of 70, then, last week, for Sosa to be picked as National League Most Valuable Player.

That’s the sort of tie that is truly fitting. The St. Louis Cardinals’ McGwire, for all his amazing feats over the years, gets the great record that he’s earned and deserved. But the Chicago Cubs’ Sosa gets the high honor, and the place in history, that the MVP confers.

As, perhaps, the ideal final touch, Sosa responded to his landslide victory (30 of 32 first-place votes) with characteristic modesty. “I would have voted for Mark. In my heart, Mark McGwire is still the man for me,” said Sosa, who may have become the contemporary symbol of the athlete who does not do an endzone dance or a throat-slash to call attention to himself. Instead, in a gesture even McGwire began to copy affectionately, Sosa blew kisses to his mom.

“It’s hard to hit 70 home runs and not win MVP. I was never so sure to myself that I had it until today,” said the Dominican-born Sosa who joined A.L. MVP Juan Gonzalez, of Puerto Rico, in giving Latin America its first MVP sweep. Just as a fabulous generation of African-American players reinvigorated baseball in the ‘50s, so has a huge wave of fabulous Latin players, led by Sosa and the Texas Rangers’ Gonzalez, have led the game’s latest renaissance.

The old game has added enormously to its popularity in the past few months, thanks to Sosa and McGwire, but millions of non-fans will still be confused at how McGwire could obliterate perhaps the most glamorous record in all of American sports, conduct himself like a true hero, play for a winning team and yet still get smoked by a huge margin for MVP. (One writer, presumably a foreign correspondent for the Martian Chronicles, put McGwire seventh on his ballot.)

Baseball prides itself on being a game that almost perfectly blends the selfish ambitions of the individual with the sacrifices needed for the team. In only a relatively few instances--the need to take a fat 3-0 pitch or hit behind the runner--do the two goals conflict. Nonetheless, the game likes to reserve its highest award for a player whose stats are married to wins.

Perhaps McGwire’s manager in St. Louis, Tony LaRussa, explained the point of view of the baseball purist best in the final week of the season when he said, “I’m so biased it’s ridiculous, but I think Sammy deserves [the MVP]. I don’t think he’s done more for his team than Mark has, but his team has done more than ours has, so his contribution counts for a little more in my book. Just barely, but that’s who I would give it to.”

McGwire now eclipses Ted Williams as the most conspicuously snubbed star in the MVP voting. At least when Williams hit .406 in 1941, he was bested by Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak for the pennant-winning Yankees. By contrast, Sosa had no clear claim over McGwire in statistics. Sosa had the edge in RBI (158-147), average (.308-.299) and led the majors in runs (132) and total bases (414). But Mac’s 162 walks set an N.L. record; his blend of slugging average (.752) and on-base percentage (.470) border on the supernatural.

But that MVP trophy says, for all time, that the Cub rightfielder wasn’t just a sidekick or a subplot. After all, Sosa was tied with McGwire at 46, 47, 48, 55, 62, 63, 65 and 66 homers. True, he only pulled ahead twice (and both times by less than an hour), but we shouldn’t forget how amazingly close this race was for the last seven weeks of the season.

The film clips of the Great Home Run Chase will focus on Sosa as Second Banana. Sosa applauding into his glove as McGwire ran the bases after his 61st homer. Sosa being lifted off the ground by a McGwire hug after Big Mac hit No. 62. Sosa saying, “Baseball been berry, berry good to me,” at a comic press conference where he and McGwire mugged like lifelong friends.

But Sosa had a movie of his own. The opening credits rolled in June when he hit 20 homers--the new record for a month. After that, everybody got to collect favorite scenes. The day he hit his 52nd, off a window in the second deck in Cincinnati, Sosa gave his bat to a 10-year-old boy in the seats. “The kid was real happy. He was crying when I gave him the bat. That’s why they come to the ballpark,” Sosa said afterward with a gentle, slightly whimsical smile.

Gradually, America began to learn the magnetic, spontaneous personality of a player who’d once hit 40 homers in 124 games but, otherwise, never indicated historic potential in a dozen pro seasons. After his tape-measure blasts, he had to ask teammates where the balls landed because he “didn’t want to show up anybody” by standing at home plate too long to admire his work.

All the while, his teammates marveled. “Sammy gets better every year. He studies pitchers better, gets more disciplined, doesn’t try to pull the ball too much,” said the Cubs 19-game winner Kevin Tapani. “What’s amazing is how far the ball carries when he hits it. He’ll golf a low slider down at the ankles and you’ll think, ‘That can’t get out of the park.’ Then it does.”

At midseason, before the nation discovered him, Reds manager Jack McKeon pulled him aside to tell him how proud he was of his maturity and growth during his career. Sosa was so touched he started sending McKeon cigars.

By September, McKeon delayed the Reds team bus so everybody could watch Sosa’s West Coast game on the clubhouse TV. “This is part of our history. Watch how he acts, how he carries himself,” McKeon told his team during that six-RBI explosion. “Think about how hard you want to work so that, someday, we’ll be good enough to have people pay that much attention to us.”

For some of us, our favorite 62nd home run wasn’t McGwire’s, wonderful as it was, but Sosa’s because it came in a crucial wildcard-race game for a Cub team that--if it had lost one more game anywhere in the season--would not have made the playoffs. It was an 11-10 extra-inning marathon in which Sosa hit both 61 and 62, both estimated by down-range tracking stations at 480 feet. Yet, on No. 62, he never smiled during his Wrigley Field curtain call because it was the ninth inning and his Cubs were still behind by a run.

Then, when Mark Grace homered to win the game, it was Sosa who met him at home plate and carried Grace in his arms for a new steps. The team had won.

Then, in due course, in his proper turn, Sosa was carried, too.

In due course, in his proper turn, Sosa was honored again--this time carried off the field, so to speak, by a near-acclamation MVP vote.

To the most exhilarating two-man, six-month, edge-of-the-impossible extravaganza, we’ll probably ever live to see, it was indeed the perfect ending.