According to Gutman, Sosa is a true sports hero, who "not only emerged as a genuine superstar of his sport, but also as a man to be universally admired for his humility, his sportsmanship, his competitiveness, his humor, and perhaps most importantly, his humanity." Even when Gutman discusses some negative aspects of Sosa's personality, they tend to be part of the fairy tale. Gutman implies that the impressions of Sosa as selfish and not a team player were misunderstandings, that he had been playing baseball for only a few years before the Rangers signed him and thus had not had time to learn the skills of baseball. Also, he at first had trouble learning to speak English, and he was an unsophisticated kid for whom the United States presented daunting complexity.

Reading between the lines, one may form the impression that Sosa, until he reached the...