Grand Slam

Until this year, Sammy Sosa was widely considered to be a Big Creep. The rap was that he was a selfish player, a braggart who couldn't deliver when it counted. Last year, up for a new contract and trying to impress his owners with gaudy numbers, he hit 36 homers but made a mess of it on the way, leading the league in strikeouts, having a worse on-base percentage than some pitchers and being so reckless on the bases that his normally mellow manager had to scream at him in the dugout on live television. His obsession with individual accomplishment led him to commission a giant "30-30" pendant necklace to celebrate his 30 homers and 30 stolen bases. His license plate read ss 30-30. He named his shopping mall in the Dominican Republic 30-30. If he could have, he would have named each of his four children 30-30. Cubs fans, who called him "Sammy So-So," were disgusted when the team re-signed him for $42.5 million for four years.

It's weird how success affects people. Most of them turn into jerks. But Sosa, 29, got his paycheck and relaxed. He let us see the generous, fun and classy person he is. And he performed. With a league-leading 154 RBIs, a .309 average and the most home runs of any other major leaguer, except Mark McGwire (he had 63 to McGwire's 64 at week's end), has ever hit, Sosa has had one of the best offensive years of any other player, any other time. Most sportswriters think that he'll swipe the MVP award from McGwire and that he is starting to cut into his fan base. Give credit to the barrage of four homers in three days that broke Roger Maris' 37-year-old single-season home-run record, just five days after McGwire. And he has made it all such fun to watch.

"The reason I struck out so much is because I wanted to do everything myself," Sosa told TIME. "Now I am willing to take a walk or a base hit. I'm having a lot of fun in '98 because I'm disciplined, and I learned a lot to be patient." He says he's cut out the late nightclubbing he used to do when he first moved to Chicago. "I used to be kind of wild," he says, until he got married, "six or eight years ago." When you're a baseball player, you've got a lot of numbers to memorize.

You've also got a lot to remember when you're responsible for a whole country. Sosa shined shoes as a kid to help pay for the two-room apartment he lived in with his widowed mom and six siblings in the Dominican Republic. When a major league representative saw him play, he thought Sosa was amazingly talented and a little malnourished. But since he became a professional ballplayer nine years ago, he has funneled money south. He has lavished three houses on his mother, bought businesses for his sisters, sent computers to schools, donated ambulances to hospitals, handed out so many Christmas gifts he's known as "Sammy Claus," built the mall in his hometown and erected a fountain where all the change that is thrown into it goes to the local shoeshine boys. In front of the mall, of course, is a statue of himself.