Statuesque

First, a confession: The Blob is shamefully late to this party. It realizes this. It apologizes.

It's been a couple of weeks, give or take, since Sammy Sosa came out and advocated for another statue to be erected outside Wrigley Field. This was not an unreasonable request, because there's plenty of candidates, given the Cubs' long, colorful and mostly heartbreaking history, for statuary.

What was unreasonable, not to say entirely inappropriate, was the statue Sosa was pounding the drum for was of himself.

Bad form to flog your own posterity, and for that Sosa deserved the raking he got in Chicago and elsewhere. But that doesn't mean he didn't have a point.

After all, he pretty much was the Cubs back in the late '90s and early Aughts.  Between 1998 and 2001, the man hit 60 or more home runs in a season three times, and he hit 50 the other time. He drove in 100 or more runs nine straight years, and drove in 138 or more four straight years. He led the perennially playoff-anemic Cubs to the NL playoffs in '98, and for a period of five or six seasons he was a Chicago sports icon, and maybe the Chicago sports icon.

This certainly sounds statuary worthy to me.

Unfortunately, Sosa did all that in the shadow of the Steroids Era in baseball, and almost alone among the prime suspects of that era he remains a pariah among pariahs. Alex Rodriguez, an admitted serial PED user (Sosa never admitted nor was ever proven to be one) is now a national broadcaster, one of the public faces of Major League Baseball. People have largely forgiven Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens, the latter two of whom continue to creep closer to Hall of Fame eligibility every year. And outside ballparks all over the country, there are statues of icons who, if not products of the Steroids Era, were at least guilty of popping amphetamines to get through day games after night games.

That, too, was better baseball through chemistry. And yet no taint attaches to them.

And they certainly don't have the untouchable-ness of Sosa, who has been thoroughly shunned by the franchise and city he once all but owned.

Maybe he doesn't deserve a statue. But to somehow acknowledge what he once meant?

That doesn't seem unreasonable, either.