By Jim Coffman
And they all stood and applauded. Alfonso Soriano had homered, doubled and then homered again, giving him four home runs in three days as he almost single-handedly led the Cubs to three straight wins over the Diamondbacks. As he strode to the plate for his fourth at-bat of the day Sunday, the Cub fans all jumped to their feet and gave him an extended ovation. And wasn’t that nice – slightly disconcerting, but nice.
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For three days in a row, Soriano’s non-solo round-trippers were pivotal, giving the Cubs the lead for good Friday, tying the game at five on Saturday on the way to a 7-5 Cubs win and then capping off the four-run first and the 10-run total in the series-winner. Even when the man made an out it was impressive. The Diamondbacks finally retired him his final time up on a rocket-shot to third.
And so he clearly deserved the applause. But hopefully no one expected him to take it to heart in a “You like me. You really like me” kind of way. Fans have every right to shred a guy who they think is an overpaid underperformer but they have to know that when they turn around and they shower him with good cheer when he turns things back around, it rings more than a little hollow.
The boo-birds (is this word a complete anachronism or is it still at least slightly acceptable? Because it’s all I’ve got for this context) succeeded in getting in Soriano’s head early in the season. The defensive miscues began to accumulate and the left fielder was in danger of getting lost in the negative spiral of bad baseball and lost confidence. He deserved plenty of criticism for instances of showboating – the incredibly dopey hops before catches and the standing at home plate to admire a drive that didn’t quite make over the fence and probably could have been a triple instead of a double. And analyst Bob Brenly, for one, didn’t shy away from delivering it.
But there was also plenty of over-the-top, practically apocalyptic yammering about Soriano being the symbol of all that was wrong with the Cubs and with baseball in general. He was the guy who was dragging everyone and everything down. Except he wasn’t. Derrek Lee and Aramis Ramirez had much worse first few weeks of the season than Soriano. And it was the bullpen (other than Carlos Marmol, of course) that had completely betrayed the cause and deserved to dragged out back and flogged en masse.
Fortunately, Soriano has handled it all the right way, maintaining perspective about the fans (knowing that no matter what color you are, the loudmouths will pound you when you’re down and cheer you when you’re up – i.e. he was the anti-Milton Bradley) and perhaps coming to his senses about the hops. He vowed not to do them anymore and although he has backslid a few times, I am optimistic he is moving on. He is also healthy this season after a knee injury clearly affected his performance for a sizable swath of the 2009 campaign.
And what a relief that is for Cubs fans (although the way this game is, a bad week turning things back around the wrong way could always be right around the corner). Because love him or hate him, Soriano and his giant contract (five more years and almost $100 million yet to be paid) aren’t going anywhere anytime soon.
D-Lacks
I don’t think I saw even one Diamondback shirt in the upper deck Sunday. Even the least popular teams almost always have a few fans on hand at Wrigley/Mecca. Fortunately, there were some other folks to hound. Three Vancouver Canuck fans marched down the aisle at one point in the middle of the game, drawing a decent amount of boos. The problem: receiving that small amount of attention probably made those Ca-shmucks’ year.
Then the Cub fans busted out a decent round of “Let’s Go Hawks! Let’s Go Hawks!”
Hawk Tawk
Good Lord, Blackhawks.
You realize Chicago is fairly fired up about this series with the Canucks, don’t you?
And that makes it all the worse when you lay an egg like Saturday’s no-chance 5-1 loss in Game 1 of the Western Conference semifinals?
I know you mailed in your effort in one of the games (#3) against the Predators as well and still managed to win that playoff series, but this sort of thing will bite you in the ass at some point guaranteed.
No matter how good this season has been so far, it will go down the toilet if you can’t muster a hell of a lot more fire than that for the rest of this series and beyond.
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Jim Coffman rounds up the sports weekend every Monday in this space. He welcomes your comments.
Posted on May 3, 2010