FORT LAUDERDALE – For now, all is copasetic in Sammy Sosa’s loud, colorful world. For now, the manager loves him, his teammates are in awe of him, and no one has yet asked him to lower the volume on his boom box. He has yet to take a premature bunny hop out of the box while a fly ball dies on the warning track. He hasn’t been asked to lift his right hand and answer a hard question about steroids.
“I am at peace,” Sosa said, a few minutes after completing his first workout as a member of the Orioles. “I am where I want to be. I am where I am supposed to be.”
He nearly ended up two hours north on I-95, of course, in Mets camp, in a place where boom boxes (along with goatees, sideburns and all references to the erstwhile law firm of Leiter & Franco, Ltd.) are officially the enemy. Sosa stroked his chin yesterday and thought of how delicious the possibility might have been.
“Wow,” he said, flashing his copyrighted Sammy Smile. “That was close. I think that the first guy [who started to talk about a trade] was Omar Minaya . . . for a moment, for a minute, for a month, I thought I’m going to end up with New York Mets.”
He paused a beat.
“I think God was looking out for me and drove me in the right direction.”
Yesterday morning, that path culminated around 9:40 a.m. when his Range Rover took the turn onto 55th Street, to his new life as fading slugger with something to prove. Out on a back field of the Orioles’ training complex at Fort Lauderdale Stadium, where the outfield fences are high and covered with foliage, the better to keep baseballs from landing in the airfield in back, Sosa did his best to try to make the world go away.
He took five rounds of batting practice. He drilled about 20 or so balls well beyond those towering gates. He stopped practice, as many of his teammates gawked at the show.
“It was kind of amazing seeing the way our players, especially our younger players, stopped what they were doing and watched Sammy do his thing,” said Orioles manager Lee Mazzilli, who as a Yankee coach grew used to the annual import of some or another big-ticket stud. “It was good for them to see what a star of that magnitude looks like up close.”
Sosa came armed with well-rehearsed answers about steroids (“I think the commissioner is doing a great job setting rules for our game”), Jose Canseco’s book, in which Canseco speculates Sosa may have been a user (“He knows the reasons why he wrote that book”) and the ex-manager who helped run him out of his former kingdom (“I don’t want to comment about Dusty Baker. I’ll keep that closed.”)
He spoke fondly of Chicago. And he promised to be a low-maintenance addition to an Orioles team that struggled to find its way last year under the first-year watch of Mazzilli
Mazzilli, of course, will have the most difficult chore of all.
Sosa’s Cubs teammates had grown so weary of their former captain that on the final day of last season, when Sosa famously bolted Wrigley Field within minutes of the singing of the national anthem, they shattered his stereo to smithereens with their bats.
Mazzilli, like his old coaching colleague with the Yankees, Randolph, prefers that music be kept within the confines of individual iPods, although he does allow boom-box music after wins, with one caveat: “If I listen to your 50 Cent, then you should be able to listen to my Dean Martin.”
Mazzilli smiled. There were lots of smiles around Fort Lauderdale Stadium yesterday, Day One of a fresh, new experiment for everyone. Sosa signed a gaggle of autographs, hit a batch of home runs, charmed most of his teammates.
“I feel perfect here,” he said.
He was helped along by his manager, whose first words to him surely played like music in Sammy’s ears: “I don’t want you to just fit in here. I don’t want you to change. Just be Sammy.”
Odds are, Mazzilli won’t have to tell him twice.
