Buzzard Sounds About Right

The hopelessly biased Chicago Tribune columnist Rick Morrissey tears himself away from his incessant gabbing about golf and fawning over straight-talkin’ Ozzie to focus on something really important: why Sammy Sosa isn’t included on the Cubs’ “Hometown Heroes” slate.

If you’re like me, you probably hadn’t heard of “Hometown Heroes” before this morning. So a quick recap: it’s another of Baron Budhausen’s fabulous promotions. Each team chooses the five best players in its history, and the voting public gets to vote on who’s best. The guys on the Cub ballot are Ernie Banks, Fergie Jenkins, Billy Williams, Ron Santo, and Ryne Sandberg.

Does Morrissey really think Sosa should have been included before any of those guys? Of course not. This disingenuous column allows Morrissey to slam his two favorite targets: Sosa and the Cubs.

Deftly reading minds, Morrissey’s take is that Sosa didn’t make the final cut because “the Cubs believe the guy was a steroids user and abuser.” That might even be true. Are there any other plausible reasons? Perhaps.

You gotta figure that with 130 years of team history, a few deserving candidates are going to be left out. Left out in the same shameful, ignominious cold with Sosa are guys like Cap Anson, Mordecai Brown, Frank Chance, Hack Wilson, Stan Hack, Charlie Root, Andy Pafko, Billy Herman, and Gabby Hartnett (and those are the guys I came up with off the top of my head). Sammy may have drawn the short stick, but he’s got some good company.

Or you could even choose to believe the company line. The Cubs PR guy told Morrissey that they opted for their four living Hall of Famers and Santo, who (a) deserves to be in Cooperstown and (b) is probably more popular than the other four.

But Morrissey bends his tremendous intellect to the task, and can’t come up with anything more likely than the steroids angle:

I’ve tried to think of possible reasons the Cubs might have ignored Sosa: his phoniness, his selfishness, his inability to hit the cutoff man. Sorry, not good enough. The corked bat incident? Nah.

And there’s no way you can keep Sosa off the list just because he walked out on the team the last day of the 2004 season. You don’t penalize a guy for being truculent. If you did, Frank Thomas would have played for 15 teams in 15 years. And he wouldn’t be on the White Sox’s top-five list, which he is…

So where does all of this leave us? If you’re a cynical buzzard, you’re left looking at pharmaceuticals.

Now is that any way to treat a hometown hero?

Well played, sir! After listing multiple reasons why Sosa is a bad person, Morrissey draws us back to his central premise (steroids) – and then cracks on the Cubs for (allegedly) using that as a reason for not including Sosa in this promotion. Talk about your double headers…

One last thing…as loathe as I am to read minds, I wonder what the reaction would have been if Sosa had made the final cut. Would Morrissey have been mollified enough to turn his attention to the British Open? Or would he have just rewritten the passage cited above and bashed the Cubs for having the temerity to list a known cheater on their “Hero” list?

Given Morrissey’s history and M.O., I’m guessing he’d choose the latter option…