Will baseball be very, very good to Sosa again?

Sammy Sosa didn’t come out of hiding and amble into baseball for the money. He’s got plenty.

Even if Sosa earns a spot with the Texas Rangers as a designated hitter, then triggers every bonus clause in his contract during the regular season -- the final frontier: 600 plate appearances -- he still makes only $2.8 million. That might sound like a lot, but not to a guy who banked eight-figure checks nearly every year for a decade.

But money, at least as one measure of how far his star has fallen, does matter.

Mike Piazza, who’s also 38, is getting $8.5 million to be the DH in Oakland, and he trails Sosa on the career RBIs list by almost 300. The guy Piazza replaced, 38-year-old Frank Thomas, just signed for two years and $18 million in Toronto, and he’s 101 home runs behind Sosa on that list.

If you don’t think that stings, then you don’t know Sosa.

He could have stayed home, and gambled that as memories of a corked bat, his sorry final season and the toxic steroid cloud over baseball receded in the distance, he would get into the Hall of Fame. He could have stood pat on 588 home runs -- fifth-best of all time, five better than the recently rejected Mark McGwire -- and waited to see whether voters treated him more respectfully than his one-time pal.

But he didn’t.

“I’ve missed the fans. I’ve missed crowds of 40,000, I’ve missed hitting,” Sosa said recently. “I’ve missed doing what I do.”

Because no sooner had Sosa hit his second home run of the exhibition season -- out of the appropriately named Surprise Stadium in a win Wednesday over the Diamondbacks -- than a lot of people sounded convinced he still can do what he once did.

“If he continues to progress, I don’t think you’ll be able to hold the cocky Sammy down,” Texas Manager Ron Washington said afterward. “But that will mean he’s doing a lot to help the team, and that’s the most important thing to me.”

The Rangers’ risk in this is minimal. As if the contract didn’t prove they’re no longer in the charity business, know that owner Tom Hicks parted with even that piece of change only after sitting down to dinner with Sosa and sending his scouts to the Dominican Republic to confirm Sosa was working as hard as reports said he was. Judging by his appearance this spring -- a taut 225 pounds -- Sosa was.

It also didn’t hurt that Texas batting coach Rudy Jaramillo coached Sosa in the Rangers’ minor league system two decades ago, and had stayed close to him since. Or that Sosa agreed to leave his boom box at home and check his entourage at the clubhouse door.

That left only two questions, and as Texas General Manager Jon Daniels told SI.com last week, Sosa aced the final part of the exam.

“We wanted to make sure he wasn’t coming back just to hit 12 home runs,” Daniels told the magazine.

And steroids?

“He said it was flat-out a nonissue for him,” Daniels added.

Sosa has managed to make it a nonissue so far by deflecting questions this way: “Let me make the team first, and then let me worry about this.”

It’s not much of an answer, but at least it shows Sosa has his priorities in order.

Whether he turns out to have more guts than brains, though, won’t be known until sometime around the All-Star break. If he’s testing clean and productive enough to have a job by then, there will be fewer questions about his past, both from the rest of the world and perhaps even Sammy himself. Fall short of either accomplishment and Sosa has sealed his fate -- for the worse.

Maybe taking a big risk comes easy to someone who started out with little, playing baseball in the streets with bundled rags for balls and tied-together milk cartons for shoes.

And who could forget Sosa in the early days of the steroids scare, calling reporters over to his locker and holding up a bottle of Flintstones vitamins as the source of his considerable power?

Or the time he got caught using a corked bat and swore with a straight face that it was just for batting practice, “to put on a show for the people”?

This one could turn out to be a show, too, or more likely, a sideshow to Barry Bonds’ gloomy pursuit of Hank Aaron’s cherished mark. Either way, it’s an audacious dare. Just by showing his face in training camp, Sosa reminds us that not just hope springs eternal; sometimes pride and recklessness do too.