There’s an old Jacobite ode that goes like this:

Sé mo laoch mo Ghile Mear
‘Sé mo Chaesar, Ghile Mear,
Suan ná séan ní bhfuaireas féin
Ó chuaigh i gcéin mo Ghile Mear.

Roughly translated, it means:

He’s our champion, our dashing Hero
He’s our Caesar, our dashing Hero
We’ve found neither peace nor fortune
Since our dashing Hero went away.

Sammy is retiring today.  It will be the end of one of the saddest chapters in Cubs history, a chapter filled with Rick Reilly ambushes, TribCo hatchet jobs, corked bats, two-faced fans, and the pallor of PEDs.  But it’s also a chapter filled with some of the best times we’ve seen as Cubs fans.  It’s a chapter about the best Cub player I’ve ever seen.Maybe someday, the Cubs will wise up and have Sammy back, and he’ll sprint out into RF one last time, and say the goodbye he was never allowed to say.  Some say Sammy wouldn’t do it, but I think he would.

You see, Sammy, like Bonnie Prince Charlie (the real “Mo Ghile Mear”), always had a marvelous sense of occasion. 

Everything about Sammy was huge, larger than life. The moonshot homeruns, the bulging biceps, the hop, the sprint, the poverty relief flights he made nearly ever summer to his native Dominican Republic—Sammy always did it big.  But the thing I’ll always remember about Sammy was the quietest HR trot he ever took

It was September 27, 2001.  Just 16 days after the tragedy of September 11, and nine days after baseball resumed.  For some, it was far too soon to begin to play games; for others it was a welcome return to normalcy, a brief respite from the twin specters of death and hate that hung over us.  Most just didn’t know what to do.

But Sammy knew exactly how to handle it.

As the Cubs took the field to begin the game, Sosa did his customary sprint into right, only this time, instead of a few baseballs, Sosa carried a small American flag.  And as the right-field bleachers sounded his arrival, Sammy smiled up at them and held out his little flag as he jogged along the wall.

In the bottom of that same inning, with two outs and no one on, Sammy sent a Shane Reynolds pitch in the right-center field bleachers for his 59th HR of the season.  As the frustration and pain of the past two weeks exploded into a massive cheer, Billy Williams handed something to Sammy as he round first base.

And there it was.  Fluttering in Sammy’s right hand was that little American flag. 

In the grand scheme of things, it was only a small gesture.  But in that place, on that night, it was the perfect gesture. 

I don’t go in, at all, for jingoism and sunny-day patriotism.  In fact, some of my work is devoted to deconstructing the underpinnings of those things.  However, what Sammy did that night wasn’t some sort of puffed-up xenophobia.  It wasn’t “my country, right or wrong,” nor was it “AMERIKUH! FUCK YEAH!”  It was instead a simple, subtle way of saying,“I feel your pain.” As Sammy said after the game,“What happened in New York affected everybody, the whole world.” It was that rare moment when Superman takes off his cape, when the massive superstar takes a chance, lowers the facade, becomes a regular person again, if only for a brief moment.

2001 was Sammy’s swan song.  It was his finest season, the peak of an amazing career that looked improbable at the start, and he would never again be the same player.  In 2002, he began a steady decline, and by 2004 Sammy would be sounding a lot of sour notes with the Wrigley faithful.

But for one night in September, he was pitch-perfect.