Sammy Sosa has to come clean. A few different connotations in that sentence, aren’t there?
Will he do it? Will he publicly admit that he used performance-enhancing drugs to help him hit all those home runs?
That seems to be the only thing separating him from the Cubs’ good graces.
Chairman Tom Ricketts reiterated Saturday at the Cubs Convention what he had said in an interview with 670 The Score a week earlier: Sosa has some explaining to do if he wants to be part of the family again.
“I appreciated him as a great player, a great Cub,” Ricketts said. “Certainly, he was an important person to this franchise. I’m sure everyone in this room cheered for him at one point.
“But nothing has really changed from the way I really feel about this. At some point, something will happen that will allow us to welcome Sammy back. I look forward to that day. Until that day, I don’t have anything to add.”
That “something’’ is an apology or, as Ricketts put it to The Score, “a little bit of honesty.’’
And that’s where it will take Herculean strength for Sosa, who has never been on close terms with humility, honesty or any hint of weakness. He would have to acknowledge that many of the 545 home runs he hit for the Cubs were PED-fueled.
He didn’t help himself with either fans or the organization when he bolted Wrigley Field during the first inning of the last game of the unpleasant 2004 season.
But that was small potatoes compared with the steroids question. I have no doubt that many Cubs fans will welcome him back if he confesses his baseball sins. I have huge doubts that he can bring himself to do it.
