SURPRISE, Ariz. - The line is three deep, 30 wide, to see Sammy Sosa, held back only by good manners and a thin tape. Sosa is moving from one practice field to another several hours before the Texas game against the Rockies.

"Sammy, Sammy, Sammy," the voices urge him to stop, not as many, not as loud as he might remember, but impressive for a lost corner of the desert where a lost hero has come to get back his soul.

Sosa stops and kneels to take a piece of paper from a small girl. He scribbles quickly and hands it back to her. She takes it and stares at her feet.

"Do you like baseball?" Sosa asks.

The girl says nothing.

"Do you like Sammy?" Sosa asks.

She turns and buries her face in her mother's skirt. Sosa is now stuck and baserunning drills are on hold. He spends the next several minutes being adored. He signs balls and caps and other things and says thanks and tells strangers he loves them before trotting off to his next task.

"I love the people," Sosa will tell me later. "And the people love Sammy."

It all may very well be true. Certainly it once was, and if Sosa has tarnished it a bit with an ugly exit from Chicago, an indifferent stopover in Baltimore and a guilt-by-association appearance before Congress, that is only in the mind of others.

He is what he was in his mind and even on the field this spring training, hitting the ball long and consistently, enough so that the chance he took to offer himself at a rookie's wages is now working out just as he believed it would.

"I am fresh; things are making sense to me," he said, his English always as good as he wants it to be.

I need to explain to him what the word "skeptic" means when I ask if he has returned to prove his skeptics wrong. And even then I am not sure he gets the nuance. A skeptic, I say, is someone who thinks you can't hit any more.

"Your skeptics can watch," he said.

There will be no doubt of that, because Sosa is still watchable. He looks about the same size as when he left the Cubs, not the smaller version who turned up in Baltimore.

Stepping into the batter's box, Sosa carefully scrapes away the back line with his right foot, squirms his cleats until he is comfortable and flicks the bat with the same insolence as always, ready to do harm.

There is menace there and I can't testify if the old skip out of the batter's box, the chest thump or the heart kisses are still there, because this is spring training and he was merely ordinary on this day.

There was not much, an easy double play in the first inning, a groundout in the fourth, a sacrifice fly in the seventh before leaving.

Sosa had gotten a hit in every game he played this spring until he came up against the crack staff of the Rockies, which merely gave up 12 runs to the Rangers' eight.

The Texas media guide gave Sosa nine pages even when it was uncertain he would make the team, certainly some kind of record for a nonroster invitee. Now on the 40-man roster, and only six cuts left for the Rangers, he surely is going to get his chance.

Every one of his 588 home runs is listed, his first off Roger Clemens back in '89 to his latest off the Angels' Ervin Santana (and coincidentally, his last homer off a Rockies pitcher was in '05 off Byung-Hyun Kim, not that he is likely to get that chance again, Kim's fault, not Sosa's).

He carries all of that with him to the plate, and his challenge and his risk is to meet the majesty of it.

Sosa came back to the Rangers because he was welcome, not true everywhere. The Texas hitting coach, Rudy Jaramillo, was Sosa's minor league manager.

If he was merely a conversation piece, then he has provided the conversation.

And he is one of the most famous baseball players alive, will be as long as he is alive, and if his fame comes with an unwanted curiosity, about steroids, about corked bats, about a general sourness that followed so many summers of clear joy, he should try to fix it.

Sosa is back in baseball to restore that joy, and if Barry Bonds can carry on, if Roger Clemens can pick his spot, if Pete Rose can lose every bit of decency to try to get back into baseball, then Sosa can take his shot.

He will have to play and he will be judged, so the stopping and smiling and accommodating are not only forgiven, but welcome.

Sosa wants 600 home runs, a mere 12 away, as if that number is some sort of absolution for any doubt, a magic hedge to stem suspicion. It is not, of course, but had Sosa stayed hidden like Mark McGwire, the last impression would be the indelible one.

A summer of the old Sammy will go a long way to erasing the sour Sammy, and a legacy is worth chasing.

lincicomeb@RockyMountainNews.com

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