#my paul stan era is my best era lets be honest

[guardian-angle22]

I love how you have Paul reaction gifs to every ask 😂 your Paul game is on fire 🔥

thank you so much!

this makes me so happy and proud, what a compliment!

my Paul reaction gif folder has about 45 gifs in it right now but tbh I need to make more. I'm starting to re-use ones I've already posted and I can do better c'mon. I just gotta have some more free time to make some 🤣

[earwaxinggibbous]

Eminem - Worst to Best

So I was watching theneedledrop and thinking I could do this too. That’s all the prefacing you’re gonna get.

I know it’s hard to believe I can judge Eminem from an objective standpoint considering I’m such a big fan that I ranked Kamikaze as my favorite hit song of 2018 (my actual favorite song was probably When You Die by MGMT or Stop Smoking by Car Seat Headrest for the record) but I am able, physically, to have negative opinions even about the rap god himself.

My only rule is that this only includes his full-length studio albums. Infinite won’t be here due to my lack of knowledge regarding it, but everything else is fair game. This will be heavily opinion-based.

Let’s go and start from the worst!

9. Revival (2017)

Initially I was gonna put Encore below this one. After all, in my opinion, there’s nothing egregiously awful about Revival in my mind. It just sort of existed to me, like that dead roach that stayed in my high school’s gym for over a month before disappearing without a word about it. 

It wasn’t until I gave a few of the tracks a re-listen that I realized Revival has nothing going for it. This is Em’s sellout album, the one where he collabs with Beyonce, Ed Sheeran and goddamn X Ambassadors in the vague hopes that it’d get him a hit. Songs that don’t bother having clever writing because all they need to do is slap a semi-important pop singer on the hook.

It’s easily Em’s most ballsless album. In a universe where Kill You and Same Song & Dance exist, there is no need for Framed, Em’s almost saddening attempt to return to his Slim Shady roots even though, let’s be honest, the years of Shady are long behind us.

I’m not saying I need Em yelling slurs and talking about murder every five seconds, I just want him to be, for lack of a better word, the most authentic version of himself he can be. And this really isn’t it to me. No amount of politics or wordplay can hide that this is a sham of what an Eminem album should sound like. I don’t need diss tracks, or songs about serial killing, I just want him to say what he wants and not hold back.

Everything about the album is weak and tired. Every song melds into one another, without thought or purpose, only broken up by the celebrity hooks that define them. It’s the blackest mark on Em’s discography, and easily his worst album to date. Not even worth sneezing at.

8. Encore (2004)

I guess we shouldn’t let Em do whatever he wants...

Encore has the opposite problem that Revival does, and it’s a problem I empathize with. Encore is essentially word vomit in album form. It’s the musical equivalent of Jack Kerouac’s spontaneous prose, loud and incoherent and kind of gross. It’s what happens when ambition goes unchecked, and Em just leans a little too far into what the media says about him.

This was also deep in the throes of Em’s drug abuse problem, and it shows. This album feels like a bad drug trip, sludgy and gross and heavy, in a way that makes it hard to move your arms and legs. With these absolutely god-awful sung choruses on songs like My First Single, Eminem dares you to make less sense than him as he rambles like a crazy person through song after song, only taking breaks from his half-attempts at comedy on tracks like Mosh, Like Toy Soldiers and Mockingbird, which try to be serious. But it’s hard to be serious when you’re essentially getting choked in a soup of valium and regret.

I don’t hate Encore like I do Revival, because in some ways I can understand where it comes from. It’s trying to do the same sort of thing its predecessors did, with silly songs and serious ones. But the funny songs are so weird and frankly gross that it quashes any attempt of seriousness. It’s like Eminem thought the only way to make his songs better were to take what his detractors hated about him and turn it up to 11. Songs like My First Single are complete nonsense complete with gut-churning sound effects and a shitty beat, whereas Just Lose It, a song I’m ashamed to admit I enjoy, fills itself with baseless offensiveness and weird reference humor to function. And that was the big hit single off of this album.

Really I think Just Lose It was the best way to sell this album. What says Encore more than a song insisting that Eminem diddles little boys? FACK would’ve been in place on this album, which is not a compliment.

7. Recovery (2010)

Recovery shares a lot of problems with Revival, a lot of radio-bait songs featuring pop artists that have no business being within ten feet of Eminem. But I’ll admit its singles were far superior to that of Revival. No Love was far superior to anything Revival spat out.

I just kinda don’t care about this album. Other than how Love The Way You Lie was permanently ingrained in the cultural consciousness around 2010, I have very few thoughts about it. I remember hearing most of the singles when I was in elementary school, and they were all just kinda fine. Space Bound was okay (other than that coked up line about love being ‘evil’ spelt backwards) and Not Afraid was sincerely underwhelming considering what it was going for.

It’d been diminishing returns for Em for years, so I’m not shocked he needed some time to get back on his feet. But there’s just not much to say about Recovery. I feel like Em was a lot prouder of it than anyone else.

6. Kamikaze (2018)

At some level, I feel like Kamikaze set itself up to fail. And it did pretty well in spite of that.

The album’s main selling point was that it was dissing everyone. Shady’s gonna name names, I remember hearing, as this album dropped right the fuck out of nowhere in the late summer of 2018. Diss track drama has never really been for me, since oftentimes it pits artists I like against one another over petty bullshit. And hearing that Em slammed people simply for disliking Revival only made me more nervous about what Kamikaze’s outcome would look like.

I’m glad to say it was not nearly as bad as I was expecting.

I’m sort of on the fence about this album. While I think it is punchy, and pretty fun lyrics-wise, it definitely doesn’t hold a candle to any of his older stuff. It doesn’t even really hold up against MMLP2. It’s less that I enjoy this album, and more that I enjoy the possibility of Eminem managing to pick himself up after Revival and move into the new age while still being himself.

Easily the worst moment on this album is Eminem calling Tyler the Creator the f-slur and even implying he’s pretending to be gay, which he has since apologized for. However, the scariest thing to me that the line represents is the possibility that Eminem’s personality is too anachronistic. That in an era of young-adult trap rappers with very experimental homemade beats, there’s no longer room for a famous, albeit angry man in his 40′s being backed by a studio. It’s the years of Soundcloud, where anyone can be a rapper, and someone as old and frankly polarizing as Eminem may never truly have the limelight again.

Em’s style has simply fallen behind the times and he will never be content with updating himself, because that isn’t who he is. And while I love that about him, I think it might speak disaster for his career.

I like the songs though.

5. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 (2013)

Now we’re getting into the good shit. The Marshall Mathers LP 2 starts off with a bang, the first song being Bad Guy, a direct sequel to Stan and an incredibly powerful sequel at that. Eminem asks questions about his fame, his identity, and most notably, he fucking gets murdered at the beginning of this album.

MMLP2 strips off all but one skit. No Paul Rosenberg cameo on this one. This was him getting serious after the relative failure of Encore and Relapse. This was, frankly, what Recovery should’ve sound like. With Berzerk being a fun sort of party hit, Rap God is what really got him back on the map. The song asserts his lyrical dominance. It is a brag track, and it earns that right.

Despite it being of incredibly high quality, this is nowhere near Em’s best work, which speaks highly for his track record. The fact that something this well-made is comparatively mediocre when put next to the top four is incredible to me. This album is more of a revival than Revival was. It’s Eminem reaching out of the dirt after being buried and yelling “Hey, I’m not dead yet!” It’s the hearbeat running through a comatose body as they return to consciousness.

But when it comes down to it, I love what this album represents to me more than its content. Aside from Berzerk, Bad Guy and Rap God, none of the songs really stand out either way. It’s all good, of course, but none of it can match up to his older work. Regardless, this album means a lot to me on a spiritual level. Whenever I listen to this I feel like a proud parent, and Em is my son who just completely crushed his elementary school talent show.

It’s a good feeling.

4. Relapse (2009)

At this point it was sort of like picking my favorite child. My number one is obvious, but deciding how to order these three was trouble.

People will probably argue with me saying that Relapse is one of Em’s best, but fuck that. This album is severely underrated among the fanbase, and is an incredibly powerful listen. This album is an auditory representation of rock bottom, in the best way possible.

This is one of the only albums to really define a split between Marshall and Slim Shady, with Slim being a deep-voiced demon and Marshall being a fucked-up middle-aged man who just came staggering out of a rehab center. The way the characters play off of one another is beautiful, Slim trying to manipulate Marshall into his ways and wiles. This also easily has the most horrorcore-type sound and content out of any Eminem album, with Slim occasionally playing the role of a serial killer, such as on 3 am or one of the standout tracks, Same Song & Dance. Insane tells a story possibly regarding Slim’s father, or maybe representative of something else entirely.

One of my few issues with this album, aside from We Made You of all things being one of the singles, is that one of the best tracks is only on the deluxe edition. My Darling ties off the Slim and Marshall story in a nice little bow, plus Careful What You Wish For sweeping up all the themes and putting them in one place.

This album is beautiful, it’s cinematic in a way. It’s deep and powerful and incredibly, incredibly scary, with Em at his lowest point in his life and career. Sadly, it was not well-received critically, which I think is a shame. Clearly they weren’t seeing what I see.

3. The Eminem Show (2002)

Screw Revival, this is easily Em’s most politically powerful album yet. I listened to this whole thing on a boombox I got at Best Buy for 20 dollars and I felt like I had fucking transcended.

This album pulls out all the stops, immediately starting out on White America, a song so goddamn strong that every time little me heard it on the radio I immediately got down and lost my shit. I didn’t even understand what it was about, all I knew was that it was big and important. And it is.

While his first two big albums tried to be weird and threatening, The Eminem Show just wanted to be big, and talk about big things. Eminem fearlessly tears into heavily-charged concepts in White America, Say Goodbye Hollywood and Square Dance. Then on the flipside he aims the gun at himself on tracks like My Dad’s Gone Crazy, Cleanin’ Out My Closet and even Hailie’s Song. It’s a gut-punch of an album, this is where Eminem is truly fearless.

I’ll also say I feel this album is a little bit more accessible, weirdly enough, than Em’s earlier stuff. It’s much less crude and aggressive, but still carries his trademark style. It’s got the skits, he yells a lot still, but the topics are easier to swallow than his earlier albums. I’d say it’s a good entry-level Eminem album if you’re threatened by rape jokes and Em yelling the f-slur constantly. And unlike what Teens of Denial was for Car Seat Headrest, I feel like The Eminem Show manages to be that entry-level album without completely castrating Eminem’s lyrical content.

But even longtime fans can gain enjoyment from this album and how loud and proud it is, how fearless Eminem really is on this album. This one, more than anything, is the unfiltered Marshall Mathers experience. No filters, no jokes, just him and his daughter and Dr. Dre.

But easily the best part of this album is the DVD extras thing where you get a free episode of the Slim Shady Show. Fuck yeah.

2. The Slim Shady LP (1999)

The Slim Shady LP was Eminem’s first really successful work. It was also the first thing he ever put on a CD. Yeah, Infinite was on cassette only. And this album is fucking great. It’s a perfect debut for Eminem. It’s got his first big hit, My Name Is, and a myriad of other great tracks. It’s just good late 90′s rap, with fun beats and interesting lyrics. As much as I love SSLP, I don’t really like talking about it because... yeah, it’s good, I’m just never sure what else to say.

And that might make it sound like I like it less than The Eminem Show, but no, that’s not it. As much as I think political Em is great, I’ll forever prefer nasty rat boy Em any day. This is the Em that inspires me the most, the grody, crude one that reminds me of myself. Best tracks include 97 Bonnie and Clyde, Bad Meets Evil and of course My Name Is. This is also the only album where Ken Kaniff is played by Aristotle. There’s your fun fact for the day.

1. The Marshall Mathers LP (2000)

FUCK everyone else, I respect YOU!

The Marshall Mathers LP is a defining rap album. It’s lyrical perfection, the hooks are god-tier, and it is without contest the best Eminem album of all time. I doubt he’ll ever top this, and if he does it’ll probably break space-time. 

MMLP ticks all the boxes an Eminem album usually should. It’s quirky, it’s comedic, it’s dark, it’s angry, it’s violent, it’s everything I could want and more. But beyond that, it’s the thing that really proved what Eminem can do. He can tell stories, he can do lyrics, he can flow, he has good beats, he can murder his ex-girlfriend, he can get his own songs censored on the uncensored version of his album, he can do it all.

The songs on this just put me in a good mood. Even though they’re horrible, and I don’t mean they’re bad songs. The content is absolutely fucked, this album is not for the faint of heart. But it makes me feel represented, not for being gay, trans, mentally ill or short, but for being a fucked-up weirdo who lived a fucked-up life and just wants to scream and lose his shit. More than anything, this feels like an album that’s there for me, for better or for worse.

The standouts on this album in my opinion are the two “named” tracks, Kim and Stan. These tracks are incredibly disturbing, but they both mean a lot to me and are incredibly written and acted. The Real Slim Shady is still an amazing single with an awesome, hopping beat. I’m Back is incredibly solid, Criminal is cleverly contradictory, every track on this album is great without any misses. If there were enough words in the English language to describe how much I love this album, I’d probably use all of them.

This album couldn’t exist today. If this came out today, it’d probably be thrown to the wayside for a myriad of reasons. It’s too late 90′s, it’s too dark, it’s “problematic”, we have like 500 white rappers now, but for the record: Anyone who writes this kind of music today owes it to Eminem, ESPECIALLY all of the white rappers who insist they’re better than him. (Looking at you, MGK.) Even if he’s not doing that great now, even if you don’t like him, it’d be foolish to not acknowledge what MMLP did for rap. And not only was it influential, but it still holds up to this very day.

So there you have it. All of Eminem’s full albums (besides Infinite oopsies) listed from worst to best. Have any differing opinions? Leave a reply. Just be polite, you filthy animal.

[yahoo-puck-daddy-blog]

What We Learned: The Wild are going to be expensive, but will they be good?

The Wild have a large range of outcomes for 2018-19. (Photo by Jason Halstead /Getty Images)

Off the top of your head, where do you see the Minnesota Wild finishing in the Central this season?

They’re only technically in the same league as the division’s twin titans of Nashville and Winnipeg, which seem destined to finish 1-2  (you pick the order).

Of course, the Wild finished in that third spot last year; a distant third, mind you, with a 13-point gap between Winnipeg and themselves. And that came with some serious ups and downs; they were one of the worst possession teams in the league last year, and really only got to where they were because of an a PDO that was ninth-highest in the league.

And to be fair, they had a number of key players miss a pretty good amount of time. Jared Spurgeon only played 61 games. Zach Parise just 47. Nino Niederreiter checked in at only 63. Those are all very useful players and if they’re missing a quarter or close to half of a season, your on-ice results are going to suffer, especially if they miss a bunch of games at the same time.

But at the same time, Eric Staal scored 42 goals and 76 points. Jason Zucker cleared 30 in both goals and assists. Mikael Granlund had 67 points. Ryan Suter and Matt Dumba both hit 50 points from the blue line. Devan Dubnyk was once again top-notch at .918 in 60 appearances.

The problem for the Wild, then, is that the rest of the division seems to be improving, and it was pretty tightly packed around the middle of the Central to begin with. Nine points separated Minnesota from sixth-place Dallas, with Colorado and St. Louis between them. I would argue that all those teams improved this offseason, and Chicago should be (much) better if Corey Crawford is fully healthy, even if they’re not the Chicago of old.

Note that many of the Wild players I just listed as having enjoyed great seasons are, for the most part, outside their prime production years. Staal and Suter will turn 34 during next season. Spurgeon will turn 29. Dubnyk just turned 32. Other teams have aging producers as well, obviously, but these were some pretty outsized years from past-their-primes players, so it’ll be interesting to see what they can actually put together in 2018-19.

The real problem with the Wild, though, is the playoff format. The gap between Nashville/Winnipeg and the rest of that division is so significant in terms of on-paper quality (you can never guess when injury or quirky underperformance will rear their heads) that you’re better off finishing in the wild card spot in the division and taking your chances with the winner of the Pacific than finishing third and getting as brutally crumpled as the Wild did in the first round last year.

And with the new contract Matt Dumba signed over the weekend — five years with a $6 million AAV, the value of which I’ll get to in a minute here — this team is about $5.6 million south of the cap limit, and still have to re-sign Zucker, who has 111 points over the last two seasons. That scoring total ties him for 63rd in the league in that time, just ahead of Jordan Eberle and Sean Couturier, for instance, and likely means he’s going to be looking for a fat paycheck. That probably pushed Minnesota up around the absolute top of the league in terms of cap obligations.

(Also worth noting: There are few Bruce Boudreau stans in the hockey media bigger than me, but my man only has so much to work with, y’know?)

So this is a cap-limit team with a first-round-limit ceiling in the playoffs unless things go very heavily their way. This is, I guess, why the team brought in a new front office crew this summer; there’s a recognition that they’ve built a rather expensive team that probably reached its peak in terms of reasonable competition within the division, let alone the Western Conference or league writ large. And with so many of their top players (such as they are) on the wrong side of 30, one wonders how much longer this approach is going to be kept up.

Simply put, seventy-nine-point-something million dollars a year to get bounced in the early rounds of the playoffs again isn’t and shouldn’t be viewed as a tenable situation, but as I wrote repeatedly like four or five years, simply paying a lot of money to players who are above-average but certainly not stars in the league doesn’t make them worth their contracts. The Parise and Suter contracts don’t expire for seven more seasons and it’s a hell of a lot of money to spend on two guys whose impact on the ice is going to diminish.

The good news is there aren’t too many long-term commitments otherwise — Dumba and Niedereitter, both of whom are under 26, are the only other guys signed for more than the next three seasons — and the team does have some promising, youngish players to supplement the old guard. That Dumba contract is probably a little too much in terms of AAV, but he has 35 goals over the last three seasons and you gotta pay for guys like that, I guess.

Only 12 defensemen in the salary cap era besides Dumba have cleared 50 points in a season before the age of 24, so what are you gonna do? The term is fine, for sure, but Dumba doesn’t really move the needle in terms of underlying numbers; he’s still improving given his age, but paying a lot for that particular player seems more optimistic than rational. Because of those 13 defensemen, only eight repeated their 50-performances at least once before turning 28.

Nice to have young players who can make an impact, certainly, but the Wild fall into that classic trap of having a number of goodish, cheapish young guys and goodish, expensive old guys and very little in between, which doesn’t allow for a continuity of quality over years.

And with this team in particular, what even is that quality, really? Can you really afford to run out the clock with all these early-to-mid-20s and mid-30s players over the next three years if this is where you’re gonna get?

While anyone can get on a hot run and make a deep playoff push, the Wild don’t really have a realistic chance to do that unless they land outside their own division for the playoffs. Which is theoretically possible, but in actual practice you shouldn’t want to hope you finish seventh or eighth in the West to get a viable path to the Conference Final, where you’re likely to get clubbed anyway.

So the Wild, again, seem to be at a crossroads with the direction of their franchise, but none of their paths forward seem particularly favorable.

What We Learned

Anaheim Ducks: They’re officially bringing back, well, a version of the original Mighty Ducks jersey, which should just be their actual jersey anyway. This one kinda stinks but what are you gonna do?

Arizona Coyotes: God if the Coyotes are worth $500 million, what’s Vegas worth now, a year after paying that same amount of money to be a team?

Boston Bruins: The cool thing about if the Bruins got Artemi Panarin? He would be the second-best left wing on the team.

Buffalo Sabres: Casey Mittelstadt looks like he could soon be a difference-maker at the NHL level, which is probably a little ahead of schedule to be honest.

Calgary Flames: The Flames love putting useful young depth players on waivers for no reason, but at least they didn’t lose Brett Kulak for nothing like they did Paul Byron.

Carolina Hurricanes: I would not recommend making a 19-year-old rookie your No. 1 center, no.

Chicago: Jonathan Toews wants a big bounce-back season for himself and his team. I want a million dollars. Nice to want things.

Colorado Avalanche: The Avs are probably going to avoid arbitration with Patrik Nemeth and that’s the only guy they need to re-sign at this point.

Columbus Blue Jackets: *Craig Finn voice* Don’t let Oliver Bjorkstrand explode!!!!

Dallas Stars: You can say what you want about the Stars but there really aren’t that many bad contracts on the books.

Detroit Red Wings: Wow the Red Wings might actually play talented kids instead of mediocre 29-year-olds in important situations. Signs and wonders.

Edmonton Oilers: Put Joe Gambardella in the NHL. Yes. Do it. Think about where he went to college and don’t be a coward!!!

Florida Panthers: Vinnie Viola is selling his mansion in New Jersey and I’m buying it.

Los Angeles Kings: A great mid-July pastime is to look at NHL signings and guess what percentage of them are AHL-quality goons. Here’s one now.

Minnesota Wild: The Wild have a new AHL head coach and it seems like when you’re hiring guys out of the Penguins coaching system you’re making a good decision.

Montreal Canadiens: This is brutal.

Nashville Predators: Yes. Thanks for asking.

New Jersey Devils: Only roster eight defensemen if you’re gonna play seven every night. Which, by the way, you should do that.

New York Islanders: Frankly, gang, I don’t know that they have much of a choice in the whole “should we tank?” discussion.

New York Rangers: When the richest and biggest-name teams in the league are openly saying they’re “rebuilding” that should be a good indication that it’s a perfectly okay thing for every team to do when needed.

Ottawa Senators: This is going really great.

Philadelphia Flyers: Man, that Forsberg-to-Nashville trade effectively got the Flyers Scottie Upshall, Ryan Parent, Scott Hartnell, and Kimmo Timonen plus a third-round pick? Good lord!

Pittsburgh Penguins: Okay, sure, Derek Grant. That’s someone.

San Jose Sharks: Chris Tierney? That’s even more someone.

St. Louis Blues: This is a take where I go, “Ahhhh, maybe?” Which kinda defeats the purpose of the take.

Tampa Bay Lightning: Really feels like everyone in Tampa is just sitting around going, “Well jeez hey when’s this Karlsson thing happening? Soon? Soon. Gotta be soon.”

Toronto Maple Leafs: Andreas Johnsson‘s one of those guys where it’s like, “Yeah he’s probably a real player.” He went point-a-game in his second AHL season and 1.5 a game in the playoffs. Granted, that’s on a stacked team, but he’s 23 and a guy who can score like that is probably a good bottom-six option at an absolute minimum.

Vancouver Canucks: I would not want to be in the business of extending Alex Edler, despite his long-term status with the org.

Vegas Golden Knights: It’s really too bad the Golden Knights didn’t have to change their name. That would have been so funny.

Washington Capitals: Yeah, no.

Winnipeg Jets: I’m gonna write more about Trouba this week but: yikes.

Gold Star Award

Maybe this makes me a kook in hockey circles but every NHL team should have as many jerseys as they want. Who cares as long as they’re cool or weird or whatever? I don’t like the Ducks’ new “classic-inspired” thirds but at least they’re trying something. More throwbacks would be a good thing.

Minus of the Weekend

This is some kinda take.

Perfect HFBoards Trade Proposal of the Week

User “Kshahdoo” loves this time of year.

STL gets Panarin (but only with extention) Toronto gets Parayko Columbus gets Nylander

Signoff

Help! Help!

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

(All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)

[brido]

In Defense of Sammy Sosa

I never loved Sammy Sosa. I just want to be clear about that from the get-go. My favorite player growing up was Andre Dawson. And I used to have to defend that choice, even to other Cubs fans who favored Ryne Sandberg and Mark Grace. But Dawson was always my guy. Then to see Sosa come in, play the same position and completely eclipse everything Dawson ever did was almost personal to me. Like, the right field bleachers is doing the ‘salami’ to Sosa? That was Andre’s Army! I almost felt a sense of betrayal.  

On top of an unnecessary personal loyalty to Dawson, I felt like the Great Home Run Chase of 1998 brought out a bandwagon element to the Cubs that I was uncomfortable embracing. And I thought all the anticipation over Sosa’s home runs made fans at Wrigley stupid - cheering for any ball hit into the air, only to get faked out by easy fly balls. Cubs fans got a bad rap for being drunken idiots who didn’t know the game, didn’t follow the game and were just there to be morons. I heard it all the time from Cardinals fans and White Sox fans. And I hated that it was at least partially true.  

Here’s the thing though: none of that is Sosa’s fault. He didn’t make new fans stupid or tell them to get drunk at the ballpark. Hell, a lot of that was the culture of the park, the culture of the city and the fact that every national broadcast of a Cubs game from 1982-1997 was announced by a beloved grandfatherly figure who also happened to be slurring every word by the 7th inning. I mean, I’ve been drunk at Wrigley Field a number of times. I love that park. I love that city. I loved being drunk there. And I loved Harry Caray too. At least in hindsight. So why not try to love Sosa?

Before I start naming the reasons to not love Sosa that I assume you’re probably thinking of, let me remind you as much as I need to remind myself; There were many times Sammy Sosa made you happy. REALLY happy. I mean, those bleacher bums in right kinda had a point. And so did the bandwagon dipshits. Sosa was pretty goddamn exciting sprinting out to right and doing the pop-and-hop after he crushed one onto Waveland. There was also the playful way he tapped his chest and blew kisses to the camera. He gave us June of ’98, when he hit 20 home runs in a month, which is an all-time record. And that home run chase was actually fucking great. The whole country got swept up in it, no matter how clouded it seems now in 20/20 hindsight. And it could be argued that the ’98 season helped to erase the memory of the ’94 strike and put the game back in the good graces of the fans.  

There was also the American flag home run in the first game at Wrigley after 9/11. And the two-run home run in the bottom of the 9th in Game 1 of the NLCS in 2003. Yeah, that series isn’t fun to think about now, but Sosa hit .308/.455/.577 in those seven NLCS games. So you can blame Steve Bartman or Alex Gonzalez or anybody else until the cows come home. But nobody in their right mind can blame Sosa.   

Okay. Now that we reminded ourselves how happy he made us, we can go further into just how good he was. 

Sosa was the best player on the Cubs (in terms of fWAR) from 1994-1996 and then from 1998-2002. He didn’t really qualify in ’92. Grace was better in ’93 and ‘97. Moises Alou surpassed him in 2003. And we’ll get to 2004. But during his overall time in Chicago, Sosa was almost twice as good as the next best player (Grace) in Wins Above Replacement. If you go off of Bill James’ Superstar accomplishments list, it breaks down like this…

1993. Member of the 30/30 Club (33 home runs and 36 stolen bases). 4.1 WAR.  

1994. .545 SLG. .300 AVG. 

1995. Member of the 30/30 Club (36 home runs and 34 stolen bases). 119 RBI. .500 SLG. 5.3 WAR.    

1996. 40 home runs. 100 RBI. .564 SLG. 5.4 WAR.    

1997. 36 home runs. 119 RBI.  

1998. He briefly held the single-season home run record. Named the National League MVP. Led the league in RBI (158). Led the league in Runs scored (134). 66 home runs. .647 SLG. 6.5 WAR. .308 AVG.        

1999. 63 home runs. Started in the All-Star Game. 141 RBI. 114 Runs. .635 SLG. 4.8 WAR.      

2000. Led the league in Home Runs (50). .406 OBP. Started in the All-Star Game. 138 RBI. 106 Runs. .634 SLG. 5.7 WAR. .320 AVG.      

2001. Led the league in RBI (160). Led the league in Runs scored (146). 64 home runs. That made him the only player in history with three seasons of 60 home runs. .437 OBP. Started in the All-Star Game. .737 SLG. 10.3 WAR. .328 AVG.      

2002. Led the league in Runs scored (122). Led the league in Home Runs (49). Started in the All-Star Game. 108 RBI. .594 SLG. 5.7 WAR.       

2003. 40 home runs.  103 RBI. .553 SLG.  

2004. 35 home runs. Started in the All-Star Game. .517 SLG.   

Boy, look at all that selfish play. James ranks him as a bona fide superstar from 1998-2003. He hit more home runs over a 5-year period and over a 10-year period than any other player in Major League history. He’s the all-time Cubs leader in home runs (545). Of the 10 players with the most-comparable stats, 9 (Jim Thome, Mike Schmidt, Reggie Jackson, Ken Griffey Jr., Harmon Killebrew, Eddie Mathews, Mickey Mantle, Willie Stargell and Willie McCovey) are in the Hall of Fame. He was Sports Illustrated’s co-Sportsman of the Year in 1998. And, not for nothing, Bill Clinton invited him as his guest to the 1999 State of the Union address, where he sat in between Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore and was one seat over from Rosa Parks.     

Advanced stats tell a slightly different story than the standard ones do. If you look at Sosa only in terms of WAR, he basically only had two elite seasons (1998 and 2001) and JAWS ranks him as the 18th-greatest right fielder of all time, below the average standards for the position amongst Hall of Famers (which are higher standards than any other position, anyway due to Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron and Stan Musial having played in right) and behind non-Hall players like Larry Walker, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Dwight Evans and Reggie Smith. 

However, Sosa’s peak (WAR7) is right above the average for all 25 hall of famers at the position. Which isn’t nothing. He’s also 5th all-time in WAR for all Cubs players (behind Cap Anson, Ron Santo, Ernie Banks and Ryne Sandberg, but ahead of Billy Williams) and the Hall of Stats site puts him in their Hall of Fame, considers him the 16th-best right fielder of all time (one spot behind Dawson, which I don’t mind) and the 6th-greatest Cub of all time (behind Anson, Santo, Sandberg, Banks and Gabby Hartnett).      

Okay. Now that we reminded you how happy he made you, and how he ranks as an all-time great, especially an all-time great Cub, we can talk about some of the negatives. 

In 2003, Sosa got caught with a corked bat. Fine. I probably don’t need to find a physicist to tell you how corking a modern bat doesn’t really do anything besides make it lighter. But the league already disciplined Sosa for that and, in the process, examined 76 of his bats and found nothing else. Maybe it was an honest mistake. Maybe he doctored one bat for batting practice, thinking it did anything. And then maybe he accidentally used it in a game. So what? How that negates everything I’ve already listed above is beyond me. The corked bat should be a nonissue. 

Now we can talk about 2004. At the end of the disappointing 2004 season (where the Cubs actually won one more game than than their previous NLCS-bound season), Sosa showed up late to the final home game, asked to sit out the game, never even dressed for that game and then went home early. He claimed he didn’t leave until the 7th inning, but security footage showed him leaving shortly after the start of the game. Then one of his teammates (rumored to be Kerry Wood, Paul Bako or Todd Walker) smashed his salsa-blaring boombox, which apparently sent the message to the organization that his teammates wanted him gone. Or that they hated him for playing the same CD every day. Either way, the Cubs shipped Sosa off to Baltimore in January, to make for a pretty inauspicious ending to his pretty spectacular tenure in Chicago. 

So maybe Sosa shouldn’t have done all that in 2004. And he probably shouldn’t have criticized manager, Dusty Baker the next day either. But he and Baker patched it up pretty quickly during the offseason. And Sosa has since apologized for everything and even paid a $87,500 fine for the incident. And listen, that season was frustrating for everyone involved. Especially when the long-suffering Cubs had gotten so close the year before. Sosa, who had suffered bizarre injuries and slumped for large portions of the season, felt like he was taking the brunt of the blame for his team’s failures. He also felt humiliated by being dropped to 6th in the order by Baker. There are better ways it could have been handled. But fans booing his image at the Cubs Convention the following winter is just as fucking petty.   

Look, those were really dark times for the Cubs fanbase. And I mean downright ugly. I cringe even thinking about the way the Wrigley Field fans treated Bartman during Game 6 the previous year. I cringe thinking about those fans during the NLDS in 2008 after Ryan Dempster gave up the grand slam to James Loney in the 5th inning of Game 1. And I think it took multiple years and a major cultural change in the organization before it even started to get better. 

But don’t tell me Sosa walked out on the fans. He walked out on Dusty Baker. And you don’t even like Dusty Baker. It was a meaningless game the Cubs won 10-8 anyway. Nobody can honestly tell me they still give a fuck about that game. And you also don’t give a shit about the precious Cubs fan base. Especially not after the way you treated Bartman. Oh, look at us, the precious Cubs fans! We wanted to kill one of our own just because he was easiest to scapegoat for all our hurt feelings and years of frustration.  

I think the reality of the situation is that Sosa came to symbolize an era of dashed hopes and futility to the bandwagon contingent, too fickle to deserve calling themselves Cubs fans to begin with. If you hate frustration and futility, as a Cubs fan, you can also hate Ernie Banks, Fergie Jenkins, Billy Williams, Greg Maddux, Ryne Sandberg and any other Cubs player who was unfortunate enough to play for that team during the miserable 108-year drought.   

And we still haven’t talked about steroids. 

Fine. During a time the Cubs fanbase decided they hated Sosa, anyway, he appeared in those infamous Congressional hearings and had his lawyer read his incredibly vague statement for him due to English being his second language. You want to be mad about that? Cool. Do you know how much money the U.S. government wasted trying to catch Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens in a perjury case? Well, they came up with exactly nothing for all their efforts. And the same shit would have happened with Sosa too. 

His lawyer read his carefully worded statement in English. The statement left room for him to have technically taken steroids orally, in pill form, from a prescription from a doctor in the Dominican Republic. Sosa didn’t have to trip up on the wording in the hearing. And your tax dollars went to a road or a school instead. Or a war in the Middle East. Whatever. You get my point. 

Then there’s the 2009 article in the New York Times naming Sosa as one of the ‘anonymous’ players who tested positive for PED’s in 2003. Ugh. Do you know how many problems there are with citing that story as your reason Sosa did steroids? Okay sure, Doctor SuperFan, what drug did he do then? What was the source of the information? Can the test you’re citing distinguish between PEDs and over the counter, legal drugs? You have no earthly idea. 

And this was in the Wild West days of the league before they even had a PED policy, in an era of almost total complicity, from the fans and all the way up to the commissioner’s office. Sosa never actually failed a drug test. He was never actually disciplined by the league. And all you have is your eyeballs and the thoughts and opinions of other clueless fans who are also not biochemists, don’t really know how PED’s can even affect baseball performance, don’t know about Sosa’s dogged work with Jeff Pentland in the batting cages after the 1997 season, don’t even lift fucking weights to know how that works and probably still get a red ass over his corked bat for the same ignorant reasons.

Don’t get me wrong. He totally did steroids. 

But I can’t prove it. And either can your buddy from work or the four guys you know who still try to say Barry Bonds’ head got three times bigger or whatever. That’s my point. And by now you’ve already forgotten that Sammy Sosa, on several occasions, made you really, really fucking happy.   

So what else? What other anti-Sosa arguments could you possibly have? Tom Ricketts wants an apology from him? Tom Ricketts has $900 million. Why doesn’t Tom Ricketts apologize for the wage theft and economic scarcity that allows him to have that type of money in the first place (to paraphrase a meme I saw posted about Bruce Wayne one time). But talk about cheating. Dude is an investment banker. I don’t think he gets to star in his own morality play on this one.

Sosa put asses in seats for 13 years in Chicago. For the Tribune Company. He owes Tom Ricketts fuck all. Especially since Ricketts, like your buddy from work, can’t prove a goddamn thing about his PED use. He doesn’t have special information about it because he’s rich. Plus, the same phony-pearl-clutching, butt-hurt Ricketts allowed the Cubs to hire twice-busted steroid user, Manny Ramirez, as a hitting consultant in 2015 and 2016. That’s him in the photo above smiling like he didn’t get caught taking female fertility drugs in 2009. Meanwhile at the 100-year celebration at Wrigley Field, as well as the Cubs’ World Series celebrations, everyone had to pretend Sosa never existed, that he never did all the wonderful things he did for the team and that he never made you really, REALLY happy. The only thing Ricketts should be mad about is that he didn’t own the team when Sosa was making them millions in merchandise sales. Shut up, rich kid.    

As Cubs fans, it’s time we let all this shit go. Just like we let most of the rest of the old culture go. Thankfully, “That’s Cub” and other Maddonisms replaced the “Cubby Occurrences” of Lou Piniella or the frustrations of the Dusty Baker era. Or any other era, for that matter. We weathered the storm of Game 7 in 2016. Literally and figuratively, thanks to Jason Hayward. We watched Kris Bryant slip on the grass and throw a ball to Anthony Rizzo that could have easily sailed over his head, kept the inning going for Cleveland in the 10th and added to our collective list of miseries. But it somehow didn’t happen. The throw found its way to Rizzo’s glove. The Cubs won the goddamn World Series. They had a giant parade. Even Bartman got himself a ring. And I’m supposed to be mad that Sammy Sosa took a pill to make himself better at baseball over 14 years ago? Beat it, nerd. 

Barry Bonds is getting his number retired by the Giants later this year. Mark McGwire has been back in Major League dugouts. Roger Clemens has too. And his number 21 jersey hasn’t been used by the Red Sox since he left in 1996. Sammy Sosa had to hit his 600th career home run off of Jason Marquis, while Marqis was wearing Sosa’s rightful number 21 jersey for the fucking Cubs. How’s that for irony?  

Sosa’s already been punished long enough. They all have. Sosa isn’t getting into the Hall of Fame any time soon. He got less than 8% of the vote last year. In his 6th year on the ballot. And he’s basically been banished into baseball exile for over a decade like he was named an enemy of the people in some Stalin-esque purge.  It’s been 14 years. Contaminating food or water for terrorist purposes only gets you 10 years. Jesus Christ. 

But it doesn’t have to be this way. By now the Cubs can put the ugliness of the drought years behind them and actually honor a man who turned so many people at Wrigley into fans in the first place. 

Forgive Sammy Sosa, everyone. He took nothing from you. He only gave to you. And remember, he made you really, really happy. 

(Decide later if this was all just a trick so the Cubs also retire Dawson’s number and honor him with his own appreciation day... Since, you know, they can’t really do it honestly without taking care of Sosa first.)