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| Chicago ballplayer likely to get into Hall |
Based
on some of the information that has come out thus far, one-time Chicago White
Sox slugger Jim Thome will be among the inductees. It seems the 612 home runs
he hit during a nearly two-decade career are enough for him to be considered
one of the game’s all-time greats.
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| The one who likely won't |
If
you look solely at the statistics and take nothing else into account, the two
of them ought to be comparable. In fact, one could make an argument that Sosa
was far more significant to the Cubs than Thome was to the White Sox.
Thome
may well have have hit his 500th home run while wearing the White
Sox uniform, but Sosa had 545 of his home runs in the baby blue of the Cubbies.
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| The way Cubs fans will spin Thome |
Sosa
was also a major player in that 1998 season where he and St. Louis Cardinals
slugger Mark McGwire gave baseball fans a show many will forevermore remember
as they pursued the single-season record for home runs. Then, they followed it
up with an encore in 1999.
YET
AS FAR as the Hall of Fame is concerned, the question will be by how far Thome
exceeds the 75 percent of sportswriters with a ballot who support his
candidacy.
A
bigger question will be whether this is the year that Sosa finally falls below
5 percent support (he was just over 8 percent last year), which is the level at
which he gets knocked off the ballot.
Or
are there just enough people with pleasant memories of Sosa’s clownish on-field
behavior that he’ll live on for another year’s consideration?
Sosa,
of course, is the ballplayer who is tainted by the perception that he was among
the ballplayers of the 1990s who used anabolic steroids to bolster himself.
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| Sox fans have tried to forget this happened |
WHICH
HAS MANY fans thinking of him as being the equivalent of one-time pitcher Roger
Clemens and slugger Barry Bonds – two other stars whose statistics would have
one think they’re shoo-ins for Cooperstown admittance.
I’m
sure Cubs fans are going to go through their own squirming routines when the
final Hall of Fame results are announced Jan. 24. They’re going to hate the
notion that a White Sox player will get top honors, whereas the man whom they
once thought of as becoming the new “Mr. Cub” (replacing Ernie Banks in that niche)
remains a baseball “nothing.”
White
Sox fans, of course, will snicker at that notion, particularly since White Sox
fans were on to the notion that there was something phony about Sosa back when
Cubs fans were proclaiming him as the ultimate evidence of their ball club’s superiority.
Of
course, Thome isn’t really a part of the White Sox story, even if he played a
few seasons in Chicago (and is a Peoria native who grew up rooting for the Cubs
and the home run antics of Dave Kingman). I’m sure that when he gets Hall of Fame
induction, he’ll be remembered primarily for his contributions to those
Cleveland Indians teams that won league championships in 1995 and 1997 and were
generally among the American League’s better teams of the ‘90’s.
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| Thome surpassed his childhood idol |
I’M
WONDERING HOW much the Cubbie types will want to insist Thome is only an
Indian, and that Chicago has no claim to them. Of course, White Sox fans will
forevermore have Sosa to sling at Cubs fans when they get cocky about the fact
they actually managed to pull off one lone championship a couple of years ago.
Sosa
is a millstone to the Cubs, which is why he hasn’t already had his moment of
immortalization a few years ago – even though he is without a doubt one of the
best ballplayers from the Dominican Republic to play professional ball in this
country.
Even
Cubs management say they can’t fully embrace his place in their legacy until he
comes forth with the “truth” about whether he used steroids to bolster his
strength artificially.
Something
that Thome has never had to address. Which goes a long way to explain how two
one-dimensional sluggers who are only 3 home runs apart will be remembered so
differently.
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