CORK: THE OTHER WHITE GUY: It’s been two days since Sammy Sosa was caught using a corked bat, and it still appears that no one, in or out of the media, knows quite what to make of the story.
As usual with sports stories lately, PTI had the best take: Wilbon said he’s not the least bit surprised, having been taught from a young age that “bad things will always happen to the Cubs.” And Kornheiser wasn’t buying Sosa’s explanation, or the part about sending 77 of his bats to Major League Baseball to be X-rayed. TK was sure Sosa never used the bats MLB saw, and that Sammy’s real bats are presently “at the bottom of Lake Michigan.”
While fans in Chicago and at other ballparks continued to cheer Sosa like never before, certain baseball pundits predicted near-certain death for his image- among them ESPN’s odious Rob Dibble, who was about one-one-thousandth the ballplayer Sammy is. Meanwhile Sports Illustrated columnist Rick Reilly, who somewhere along the way had the genius label bestowed upon him for reasons I’ve never quite understood, went on ESPN and made the ludicrous assertion that Corkgate may actually keep Sosa out of the Hall of Fame. Then again, Reilly’s probably still bitter that Sammy didn’t take him up on his offer to take an on-the-spot piss-test during last summer’s steroid scandal.
But the most embarrassing of all were the comments on “Outside the Lines” of Jose Canseco, who’s really starting to rival Mike Tyson and Richard Williams on the “muttering to himself in a subway car” scale. This paranoid wackjob and admitted steroid abuser claimed that the media is racist for concentrating on the Sosa story, as though it weren’t newsworthy that one of baseball’s most prominent players had been caught red-handed cheating in a game. Canseco even said that “this would never happen… to Mark McGwire,” in one sentence both selling out his longtime teammate and forgetting that “this” did happen to McGwire during that Andro non-scandal in ’98.
I think blogger Jay Caruso has the last word on Canseco here:
Oh shut up you non-fielding allowing a home run off the top of your head bar brawling bitch.
UPDATE: Sosa has been suspended eight games for the incident. It’s fair- and almost certain to be reduced to five or six by a player-friendly arbitrator.
Posted by Stephen Silver at June 6, 2003 02:04 PM