The Friendly Confines are friendly once again to Sammy Sosa.
The Cubs welcomed Sosa, the most accomplished slugger in franchise history, back to Wrigley Field on Friday. It was his first time inside the ballpark since the final day of the 2004 season.
‘‘He saw the wind blowing out today and planned his trip around a good day to be here,’’ manager Craig Counsell said before the game. ‘‘[He] asked to be in the lineup because the wind’s blowing out.’’
The bitterness from the end of Sosa’s time in a Cubs uniform — he left his final game early and his boombox got smashed — carried over from one ownership group to another. The Ricketts family publicly extended Sosa’s ban from Clark and Addison, with chairman Tom Ricketts asking for “a little bit of honesty” from players associated with the Steroid Era when he was asked about the Sosa situation in 2018.
After Sosa’s somewhat vague apology last winter, he was welcomed back to Cubdom with open arms, even while saying during his appearance at the Cubs Convention that he wasn’t specifically apologizing for steroid use.
Regardless, plenty of Cubs fans always wanted Sosa back at Wrigley, and they got to hoot and holler at their former hero’s return Friday, saluting him early in the game after his highlights played on the video board. A new round of ‘‘Sam-my! Sam-my!’’ chants broke out when he waved from the radio booth later in the game.
‘‘This is my house,’’ Sosa said during his media session. ‘‘I always believed it was going to happen. Mostly, it got [to be the] time. The time is perfect. Now I’m here again, and I will continue to be here. The relationship is tremendous, so hopefully we can continue that until the day that I die.’’
Sosa obviously was decades away from birth when Wrigley Field was constructed, but there’s a compelling case to be made that he bears much responsibility for turning the ballpark and surrounding neighborhood into the bustling baseball mecca it is today.
His home-run chase with Mark McGwire in 1998 was must-see TV across the country, helping recapture fans’ attention years after the 1994 strike. The Cubs also returned to the playoffs that season — Sosa was the National League MVP — beginning the work of transforming the ‘‘lovable losers’’ into a team expected to spend big and win big. He was part of the 2003 team that came five outs away from a trip to the World Series.
Sosa had been long exiled in 2016, but the conditions that led to the Cubs’ curse-breaking World Series title were covered in his fingerprints.
‘‘Sammy, maybe he was lucky [to be in the right place at the right time], but he’s also a part of it, of when the neighborhood started changing and everything started changing,’’ said Counsell, who played against Sosa’s Cubs as a visitor in the late 1990s and early 2000s. ‘‘He was lucky at first, but then he was part of it changing and created part of the change.’’
During Sosa’s heyday, Wrigley buzzed because of him. Friday was a trip back in time, and Cubs fans got to party like it was 1998.
‘‘They have a lot to remember, right?’’ Sosa said. ‘‘The hops, the home runs, running to right field, the smile.
‘‘Remember me as the peace guy,’’ he said before launching into his trademark finger-kissing.
Things are different now. Sosa wouldn’t be able to send homers to awaiting ballhawks on Waveland, not with the gigantic video board rising above the bleachers in left field. No rooftop shots. No balls bouncing down Kenmore.
Or so it would seem.
‘‘The clubhouse, the field, everything has been [made] new — for good reason,’’ Sosa said. ‘‘If I would’ve played right now, I would have hit it to the street anyway.’’
The Steroid Era, which Sosa long has been connected to and is what has kept him out of the Hall of Fame, is looked at differently by a different generation of fans, too.
But there was also plenty of familiarity, if you listened.
‘‘Sam-my! Sam-my! Sam-my!’’
Wrigley was making the same noise it had 2½ decades earlier.