SAMMY SOSA HOMERUN HITTER WITH HEART.

• Author: Heuer, Robert

THIS BASEBALL SUPERSTAR COVERS ALL BASES, WHETHER BREAKING MAJOR LEAGUE RECORDS OR PROVIDING RELIEF TO HURRICANE VICTIMS IN HIS NATIVE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

In the summer of 1997 the Chicago Cubs made their biggest investment ever in a player, signing rightfielder Sammy Sosa to a four-year, $42.5 million contract. A waste of money, critics charged. This twenty-eight-year-old Dominican was an underachieving hotdog. Sure, he'd averaged thirty-four homeruns and one hundred runs-batted-in during five seasons for the Cubs, but Sosa produced when it didn't matter and then, with the game on the line, swung and missed at curve balls in the dirt. His nickname was Sammy So-so.

Cubs management saw somebody else wearing uniform number 21. They saw a young man maturing physically and emotionally. They saw what assessors of baseball flesh call "a five-tool player"--fast runner; very good outfielder; outstanding arm; good hitter; and power hitter. If Sosa stayed healthy, they calculated, he'd become a superstar. An outstanding family man with consistent work habits, Sosa was also a personality who could add value to what ultimately is an entertainment business.

And entertain he has. Last year a record-breaking sixty-six homerun season catapulted Sosa to rock-star status. But--as every baseball fan knows--the Dominican was not alone on his historic quest: He and St. Louis Cardinal Mark McGwire propelled the season into their own private slugfest in pursuit of the most fabled single-season record in all of professional sports. The immortal Babe Ruth hit sixty homeruns in 1927, a feat that was supposed to last forever but endured only thirty-four years until Roger Maris hit sixty-one in 1961. Thirty-seven years later, last September 8 to be exact, McGwire slapped number sixty-two barely over the St. Louis Busch Stadium fence. Five days later, Sosa hit numbers sixty-one and sixty-two--rifle shots that seared over the left-field wall at Wrigley Field and landed near a streetlight where a Dominican flag fluttered in the breeze. Two weeks later, he smashed number sixty-six, a record tied within one hour by McGwire who, in one last ball-crunching frenzy, hit four homeruns in the season's final three games to reach a season total of seventy.

Sosa proved to be a more endearing entertainer than McGwire. Slammin' Sammy's most delightful schtick comes after homering, circling the bases, returning to the dugout, looking into the television camera, making this funky little heart-tapping gesture and, then, blowing a kiss ... to his mother, Lucretia, back home in the Caribbean.

One of seven children, Sosa was seven when his father, Bautista Montero, died. His mother eventually remarried, yet it was the death of his father--a tractor operator on a San Pedro de Macoris sugar plantation--that forced the oldest Sosa brothers, Sammy and Jose, to work. Like so many other Dominican kids, they saw little hope for their immediate future other than trying to hustle coins by shining shoes. Their energy and intelligence impressed U.S. businessman Bill Chase, who had recently arrived with his wife to start a shoe factory in San Pedro's custom-free zone. In the early years, when Chase went to the city park, he'd always get a shoeshine from the Sosa boys, who soon were doing odd jobs around his factory. The friendship evolved, and the Chases and Sosas became like family. (The Chases moved to Florida in 1994 after selling a business which at its peak in the 1980s included three factories employing fifteen hundred people and manufacturing $60 million worth of shoes per year.)

A year ago the generous Sosa was...