It’s been a winter of ghosts in Chicago. The departed linger in the mind’s eye. Sammy Sosa levels his bat across the plate, not quite pointing the tip at the pitcher, then dips his head between his prodigious shoulders as if to shelter it from the violence of the swing to come. Magglio Ordonez races across the outfield with a flat-footed gait, as if running on the wet tiles of an immense bathroom floor. Carlos Lee finishes his swing with a long one-handed extension, body erect as he watches the flight of the ball. Kyle Farnsworth hangs his head in the dugout. And in the most searing memory of all, Moises Alou flings his arms down in anger and stomps his feet along the left-field wall at Wrigley.
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All these players are gone, and the Cubs and White Sox have precious little to show in return. As free agents, Alou signed with the San Francisco Giants and Ordonez with the Detroit Tigers; since their old teams didn’t offer to retain them through salary arbitration, they didn’t even receive draft choices as compensation. Lee was sent to the Milwaukee Brewers in a trade in which the best player the Sox received was Scott Podsednik, a fleet center fielder who saw a sharp decline at the plate in his second season. Farnsworth joined Ordonez in Detroit in exchange for a package of minor leaguers, none considered a top prospect. And Sosa was shipped off to the Baltimore Orioles for little more than that–mainly Jerry Hairston Jr., son of the old Sox pinch hitter extraordinaire, who at 29 has never quite played up to his promise.
Then there was Sosa. Never exactly popular in the clubhouse, he endeared himself to fans with his game-opening dashes to right field and, of course, his 66 homers in 1998, when he raced the Cardinals’ Mark McGwire past Roger Maris’s home-run record. But both were soon outdone by Barry Bonds, and all three were haunted by another specter this winter: the steroid scandal. Last fall the San Francisco Chronicle reported that Bonds had admitted in sworn grand-jury testimony to using steroids (albeit, he claimed, inadvertently). Now there’s Jose Canseco’s new tell-all naming Big Mac as a definite user and Sosa as highly suspect. Sosa’s reputation had taken a hit during the 2003 season, when he was caught using a corked bat, and the anti-Sosa faction reasons that if a player would cheat with a corked bat, then of course he’d cheat by taking performance-enhancing drugs. It didn’t help that Sosa appeared diminished literally and statistically last season–though he was still capable of tape-measure blasts. His struggles seemed to have more to do with a decline in confidence, as he waved at pitches he’d previously let pass, than with a decline in muscle mass. The image of Sosa that prevails is his trademark hop, toes twinkling off the ground and arms flapping in an abbreviated touchdown gesture, but even that was turned against him late last season when he displayed it prematurely on a couple of not-quite homers. Once it was revealed he left the last game early–the team actually leaked the videotape from the parking lot, as players talked anonymously of his infamous salsa-spewing boom box being beaten to bits–his days in Chicago were numbered.
