fellow Cubs fans, I’ve been pondering something lately and wanted to get your perspective. We all know Sammy Sosa’s performance declined a bit in 2004 compared to his peak years of 1998-2002, but he was still a productive player by most standards. Batting .253 with 35 home runs is would be considered great by todays standards. Especially for a man who was 36 years old at this point. Yet, it seems like there was a lot of booing and negative reactions towards him even before the incident on the last day of the season. Apparently the fans had tGiven that he was still putting up decent numbers for a 36-year-old, do you think the reaction was fair? Or do you feel like we, as fans, might have had unrealistic expectations due to his previous superhuman performances?
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He’d already had the corked bat and Rick Reilly incidents by then so the shine was off.
Also, he had a wRC+ of 114, which is the same as Willson Contreras this year, so “great” is overstating his offensive production
It was a really good season. I personally believe 2023 Bellinger is having a better year so far.
He struggled to catch up the fastball at that point, which hurt him. He also became streakier than ever. He was good overall but had he been more consistent that might have helped push the team over finish line.
I feel like Sammy always had a tough time winning over a lot of the fans in Chicago. A lot of people were turned off by his ego or the fact that his English never improved. Find me a top level professional athlete that doesn’t have an enormous ego. I’ll wait.
He became one dimensional at exactly the same time he started hitting all those home runs. The great arm in right field was gone, the 30+ stolen base seasons were gone, and while he was never an elite defender, he was suddenly unable to get to balls and make routine plays.
He put up 1.8 oWAR in 2004. Certainly not a terrible season, but when he had put up a 9.8 oWAR just three seasons prior, it was a precipitous dropoff that was viewed as unacceptable. All of the fans that “put up” with him as long as he was hitting now felt they had every right to turn on him and run him out of town.
The attitude was, “What have you done for me lately, Sammy?”
My memory of 2004 Sammy was him being awesome for most of the season and then falling apart (due to age) near the end of the season when the team needed him most. I was kind of right.
Sammy carried an OPS above .900 for the first four and a half months of the season, all the way through August 11th, but was only an average .747 for the final 7 weeks to finish at .850 for the year. Still good, but not “Superstar Sammy” level.
I have a lot of feelings about the end of the Sammy Saga in Chicago and the fans’/org’s treatment of him near the end, but I’ll just say this: it’s really sad he didn’t get to play on the biggest possible stage, against the Yankees!, in 2003. And 2004 just sucked in every possible way.