Bush got bum rap for Sosa deal

Many other one-sided deals litter the baseball landscape — Nolan Ryan for Jim Fregosi, Steve Carlton for Rick Wise, Ryne Sandberg for Ivan DeJesus, John Smoltz for Doyle Alexander, Jeff Bagwell for Larry Andersen, etc. — but baseball executives can’t peer into the future any better than the rest of us.

Similar things happen in other sports, of course. Washington Redskins fans with some years on them will never forget the magic date of April1, 1964, when the Philadelphia Eagles shipped us Christian Adolph Jurgensen for Norm Snead.

Did somebody say hindsight is always 20-20? Somebody should.

Despite President Bush’s relatively small role in the Sosa-Baines debacle, people keep bringing it up.

Sports columnist Randy Galloway of the Dallas Morning News went as far during the 2000 campaign as to “report” an imaginary phone call in which Democratic nominee Al Gore said he planned to defeat Bush by reminding voters of the trade.

Yeah, right.

In another misguided attempt at humor, a Web site called sportspickle.com “quoted” White House press secretary Ari Fleischer as saying, “It has now become apparent that Saddam Hussein did not allow the Rangers scouts to conduct complete inspections of Sammy Sosa’s abilities in 1989.”

Say what?

It’s unlikely that President Bush lost much sleep over what appeared at the time as a reasonable trade for the weak-hitting Rangers. But now that Sammy Sosa is playing for the Orioles in the twilight of his remarkable career, maybe he could pop over to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. one of these days and apologize, sort of, for making his former boss look bad.