Sosa’s Fans Follow His Pursuit Out of Limelight

Earlier in the afternoon, after Sammy Sosa had hit his 61st home run to get to within one of Mark McGwire, they wrote his name in soap on the back windows of the cars in Washington Heights. The message was “Sosa 61,” and the car horns began to blare as the excitement began to build, because maybe this was the day when Sosa would catch McGwire.

It mattered here as much as anywhere. Because here at the highest point in New York City, Sosa was their own.

He is Dominican. Maybe there are more Dominicans in Washington Heights than any place in this world except Santo Domingo. Now, in the late afternoon, they allowed themselves to feel as if upper Broadway were the capital of baseball. Not Busch Stadium, where McGwire had hit No. 62 the other night. Not even Wrigley Field, where Sosa plays with the Cubs. For a few hours on what was a football Sunday everywhere else, the baseball season had come here.

“We were all excited for McGwire,” Gabe Rosario would say later. He is 49 and the floor manager at Coogan’s, at 169th and Broadway. “But in our hearts we believed that Sammy could still catch him.”

Rosario’s hometown is San Francisco de Macoris. He was a ballplayer himself once in the Dominican Republic, for professional teams called Hogar Macorisano (The Macoris Hometowners) and Ayuntamiento Municipal (The City Hall Team).

He had his own dreams about the big leagues, but by the time he got to New York he was 27, and now the only ball he plays is softball in Central Park. But this summer he has learned to love major league baseball all over again, because of Sammy Sosa, who is his own.

“From the time he got hot and got close to McGwire,” Rosario said, “he has been in my heart.”

The Cubs-Brewers game was not on television. One of the sets at Coogan’s was showing golf on ESPN.

Nobody was really paying attention, and then there was an explosion of noise, because ESPN had cut in to show Sosa hitting No. 62 off an old Yankee named Eric Plunk in the bottom of the ninth at Wrigley Field. Then Rosario knew. So did Suzie Rodriguez, a bartender at Coogan’s. She is from Santiago, the second city in the Dominican. Soon she begins a teaching job in the New York City public school system.

“Some people cheered,” she said later. By this time, everyone knew about No. 62. “And some people cried.”

Then there was more noise from the street, as if news of Sosa’s home run had been written across the sky above Washington Heights.

Dave Hunt, who owns Coogan’s, had walked down the street a few minutes before to get the Sunday papers. Now, as he got near the front door of his place, he thought he saw a mistake on the back window of a livery cab.

“It said ‘Sosa 62,’ ” Hunt said. “I start doing the math in my head, because when I left the bar Sosa was still one behind. I’m wondering if McGwire had hit No. 63 the other night in St. Louis when we all went crazy. Then I heard what was going on inside the joint, and I realized that he’d caught him.”

“We think of this as Little Santo Domingo,” Hunt said. “All of a sudden it was a baseball holiday.”

Sosa’s 62nd did not stop the country the way McGwire’s did. He has positioned himself as the charming supporting player all along. But maybe not forever.

No one is calling Sosa a national hero, which is what McGwire has been called all week. McGwire is the American-born slugger. Sosa, from the Dominican, has been treated like a bit of an outsider in this thing from the start, though he has seemed quite comfortable on the outside. Sosa got off a bus from Santo Domingo when he was 16, wearing a baseball jersey with holes under the arms, and had enough bat that the Texas Rangers gave him a $3,500 signing bonus. Now he joins McGwire, at least for one Sunday, in baseball history. It makes you a hero anywhere. A new kind of national hero, in a changing country.

“I cheer today for my brother,” Gabe Rosario said.

They cheered outside the bodegas on Audubon Avenue. The traffic in the early evening was thick on upper Broadway, and on Fort George Hill, where another great Dominican ballplayer, Manny Ramirez of the Indians, used to train with a tire around his waist. A sudden baseball holiday, far from Wrigley Field, far from Santo Domingo, the highest point in New York City feeling like the top of baseball world.