Sammy Sosa Softball Slam

In 1998, Sammy Sosa was all at once everywhere. A man of humble roots, Sosa emerged from penurious origins in his native Dominican Republic and arrived in the major leagues on the cusp of the 90s, initially gaining some measure of fame for this evolution from a svelte base-stealer into a perennial thirty-homerun hitter as a member of the Chicago Cubs. Then, with little if any foreshadowing, the summer of ‘99 saw him on pace to break Roger Maris's record of 61 homeruns in a season. He would eventually eclipse that mark with a staggering total of 66 dingers at season’s end, but he was beaten to the record by Mark McGwire, who hit his fateful 62nd on September 8 against Sosa's Cubs and would wind up with the new and otherworldly benchmark of 70. Whether second-best or not, Sosa’s Herculean homerun total transformed him into duly vaunted superstar and, more crucially, a bona fide commercial commodity. His adorable face-rending smile found its way into ads peddling Big Macs and Pepsi-Cola, among other precious consumables. His power-hitting prowess even landed his image on the cover (and his name in the title) of 3DO's also-ran PS1 offering Sammy Sosa High Heat Baseball 2001. But one game was apparently not enough for the man who had hit a full five more homeruns than Roger Maris, for he also took the starring role in High Heat’s companion release, Sammy Sosa Softball Slam.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam, as its hyper-alliterative title might portend, is not a good game. Its foremost failing is its resemblance to the High Heat Baseball series. Those games were notorious for their atrocious graphics, which managed to be simultaneously jagged and blurry, blocky and faceless. Their only saving grace was their fairly realistic AI, which lent itself to progressively better simulations from year to year. With Sammy Sosa Softball Slam, however, all those appealing aspects of real baseball are gone. In their place are softball—that is, slo-pitch softball—sensibilities: viz. sandlot diamonds with chain-link backstops and chalked circles instead of pitching mounds, slab-thighed people in either jeans, shorts and sweatpants playing for teams representing greasy spoon diners, labor unions and accounting firms. The gamer has the choice of playing gendered or co-ed, but the latter, quite fittingly, is the default. Players have tags like "Big Lou" and "Burger Boy." Many of them are endomorphic in shape. In terms of gameplay, throwing errors abound. In view of these hapless facets and the overall blue-collar, working class aesthetic, the game is an accurate simulation of softball. However, inexplicable arcadey trappings like flame trails on homeruns inject jarring disjunctions of surrealism into an otherwise brutally realist game. Mr. Sosa's own team, “Sammy's Slammers”, is another disjuncture, in that its female members are, to a woman, pneumatically-bosomed. Even more bizarrely, the game features a character editor which includes the option of, at a press of the square button, turning any given player into Sammy Sosa. You can, if you so choose, make Sammy Sosa every player on every team. All told, these elements turn the game into a mockery of softball, which is sort of redundant, as softball was already doing a fine job of self-mockery.

Sammy Sosa Softball Slam leaves us with more questions than answers. Why did Sammy Sosa lend his name and cherubic smile to this proletarian abomination? Certainly he’s not the first athlete to endorse an appalling videogame at the lure of cash. Still, the bigger conceptual question remains: why is Sammy Sosa playing in the slo-pitch league depicted in the game? We can only tender hypotheses. Perhaps Sosa’s fictional foray into softball speaks to some deep-seated urge for lower middle-classness that lurked within the man even during the height of his celebrity. Maybe it relates to some latent guilt that stemmed from his alleged steroid use: as he grew more and more superhuman in both home run hitting and in sheer sinewy physicality, he became increasingly desperate to re-connect with the unpretentious, grassroots folk from whose stock he originally emerged. So intense was this desire that it led Sosa to approve of—perhaps even encourage—the idea that he not just participate in a slo-pitch softball simulation, but actually permeate it with quasi-divine omnipresence in his ability to incarnate as every slo-pitch player on every slo-pitch team, pervading all games on every slo-pitch field. The desperation, then, manifests as a largescale narcissistic fantasy, its attendant grandiosity taking on nothing less than a theological scope.

Perhaps Sosa's paramount blessing was finishing as runner-up to Mark McGwire in the homerun race. Because he never held the homerun record, the fact he tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs has not tarnished his reputation as markedly as it did for McGwire or, for that matter, Barry Bonds. Sosa’s second place finish ensured that an asterisk needn't ever be superscripted next to his total of 66 homeruns in 1998.* But with his eponymous Softball Slam, we see that Sammy Sosa flirted with—perhaps even lusted after—something much lower than second-best. That is, he wanted to be closer to the working man and woman, and the pale simulacrum of baseball that (like video games themselves) allows such people temporary reprieve from their deplorable workaday lives.

Less distressingly, Sammy Sosa’s Softball Slam may offer a more positive takeaway, especially when we consider its player editor feature. Maybe the message is that within every single average Joe and Jane who plays softball, there is an exact replica of Sammy Sosa in his prime—we just need the right cocktail of Human Growth Hormone to unleash it.

NOTES:

*That asterisk could, however, be applied to Sosa's 2003 statistics, as it was in that year that he was caught playing with a corked bat.

DISCLAIMER: I do not own the rights to the image of Sosa and spouse included above. However, it is my vague understanding that civil law protects parodic materials. This image is, quite clearly, self-parody, either consciously or unconsciously, and on those grounds its usage in this article is, in my estimation, fair.