King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Sammy Sosa dons an Orioles uniform, and for reasons unrelated to Sosa, the Cubs, the Orioles or anything else, a flood of memories begins.

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Feb. 3, 2005 | I got a funny little nostalgic feeling seeing Sammy Sosa pull on that white Baltimore Orioles jersey at a press conference Wednesday. What was funny about it was that I have no emotional involvement with the Chicago Cubs, who traded Sosa to the O's after 13 seasons and 545 home runs, nor with the Orioles or Sosa himself. I wasn't particularly sad to see Sammy leave Wrigley or happy to have him headed to Camden Yards.

Also funny is that I'm not a big fan of nostalgia. The past is fine and everything. It's where a lot of my stuff lives, like this tank of a Volvo wagon I used to have that had 120,000 miles on it before I attempted to drive it through the rear end of a pickup truck. But today's where it's at, even in sports. I'm not one of those guys who thinks the games were better back in the day when players knew the fundamentals and it wasn't all about the money. 2005 is just fine with me, bling-bling and all.

But memories are memories. All pleasant things gone forever take on a certain glow, even if you don't want to go back to them. Sammy Sosa's new Orioles pajama top was my petite madeleine because it made me think of something I hadn't thought of in almost 30 years: the strangeness of seeing Reggie Jackson on the cover of Sports Illustrated in an Orioles uniform.

Here's another funny thing. I remembered it wrong. Jackson was one of the game's top sluggers as a member of the championship Oakland A's of the early '70s. A week before Opening Day in 1976 A's owner Charlie Finley, knowing that Jackson would escape via the new avenue of free agency after the season, traded him to Baltimore in a blockbuster deal, Ken Holtzman also going east for Don Baylor and Mike Torrez, with a throw-in player on each side.

What I thought I remembered was a Sports Illustrated from that spring, with Jackson in a gleaming white home uniform, relaxed, smiling, holding a bat in one hand and pushing his batting helmet onto his head with the other. Reggie in his new uniform. The smile was familiar, the wire-rim glasses, mustache and No. 9. But an Orioles uniform?

It's hard to convey now how strange that was, to see a superstar in his prime change teams like that. It happened from time to time, but it was rare.

Next page: The past wasn't any better or worse than the present or future. It's just mine alone