Sammy Sosa for Harold Baines, not as bad as you think.
July 25, 2019
My fellow Rangers fans, from the day Harold Baines got elected into the Hall of Fame to him giving his speech in Cooperstown this past weekend, everyone I know has been asking me, "why the heck did we trade Sammy Sosa for this fella?" I don't know why everyone is asking me, a humble Mexican immigrant, to answer for the errors of the Rangers, but you gotta realize that Mr. George Bush wasn't going to make decisions about our great baseball organization lightly. The Harold Baines trade was no los exception.
I, uh... Mr. President Bush paid a lot of attention to the rest of the American League. We didn't win the division at all in the 80s, but in Chicago they won as soon as they called up Harold Baines. On that 1983 team, the Winning Dirty White Sox as we called them back in the day, Harold Baines was always hitting. I was living in Mexico so I could only watch the Rangers play outside drug store windows, but everytime we played the White Sox Harold Baines was hitting. And he would get a hit when he was hitting. It follows that he was a winning hitter, and in Texas has gonna hit and win. He didn't, but he was going to, so you can't blame George Bush.
In America we value something called loyalty. We got that in Mexico too, but America has it also. No business can succeed without loyal workers. America's economy does best when people are working three or four jobs. Most people only work one job, maybe two, so if you start getting other jobs, most people would think to leave. Not when you have loyalty, then you stay at your old jobs when you get your new jobs too. Nobody was more loyal to Chicago than Harold Baines. That's hard to do, they got a lot of crime up there, but Harold Baines loved them anyway, God bless him. Baines stayed with the White Sox for nine years, and was signed up to 1993. With so much loyalty, we figured if we signed him for those last four years, and he went up for free agency, he's stay for another ten. You might say that we traded Harold Maines to Oakland one year after getting him for Sammy Sosa, a lot of conspiracy thruters think that, and we did trade him in that case. But he had so much loyalty that we knew he'd come back in free agency. We specifically traded for him because he had that free agency coming up, but sometimes this happens and they go to Baltimore. He was still loyal to Texas, a lot of people don't know that. He did come back to Texas, which a lot of people don't know either, when he was on all those other teams. He shook hands with our players and coaches all the time as an Oriole, Indian, and White Sock, and that's loyalty.
You can't win without strong leaders. That's why the Russians always do so good in the Olympics, you don't get much stronger leaders than a dictator. People say we should have given Sammy Sosa time to get better, people say he went on to have this great career when he got older in Chicago, and he did, but he wasn't a leader. Harold Baines was a leader. Sammy Sosa never won a division until he was 34, Harold Baines won when he was 24. If you don't have it when you're young, you'll never have it. That's because of something called vision. It's the principal of leadership. A leader has vision, and you only get vision when you're young because you stay the course with the vision your whole life. The other place you become a leader is in the family. I, uh, George Bush became a leader because he had a father for his role model. Talk to me all day about how tough Sammy's upbringing all day, and I'll agree with you, but his father died when he was a kid. That's what we call el tragico in Mexico, which Americans tell is a tragedy, in the Dominican Republic. Children don't understand how to overcome diversity that comes with tragedy because they're not leaders, only adults can do that, and you're going to tell me Mr. President Bush wasn't an adult leader? Then you might be a terrorist.
Although, you have to know that Mr. Bush wasn't on my own. There were a lot of advisors helping out with the Rangers, and they all said the same thing about Sammy Sosa. Here we had a young guy from the Dominican who had all sorts of talent, but he wasn't hitting at the big league level for us. That was an easy problem to see, but the solution was a hard problem to see. The solution only exists in the future, and that solution was Harold Baines.
Now tell me this, who's in the Hall of Fame and who isn't, Harold Baines or Sammy Sosa. Checkpoint. And if you still think Mr. Bush was so dumb for trading Sammy Sosa to Chicago, you only think that because he had a good career in Chicago with the Cubs. But there's two teams in Chicago and we traded him to White Sox. We didn't trade him to the Cubs, so he can't blame us for Sammy on the Cubs, and we got Harold Baines out of it, who did better for us than Sammy did for the White Sox. It's context. Checkers.
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