He was unquestionably one of the most popular Cubs players in history. The fans oohed and aahed with every home run during the summer of 1998 when he and Mark McGwire chased Roger Maris' record.

The fans loved the way he ran to his right field spot, raising his hat in the air as a tribute to the bleacher fans each day. They loved his home run hop, his post-home run dugout routine done for the cameras, his ever-present smile, and they chanted his name when he came up to bat: SAMMY, SAMMY, SAMMY.

He received a great reception around the rest of the league too; many of the NL fans saw Sammy as the entertainer he clearly felt he was. President Clinton even invited Sammy to attend the State of the Union message one year.

The fans didn't seem to notice or care that his teammates didn't seem to feel the same way. They dismissed the anonymous grumbling, and the accusations of "me first-ism" as jealousy.

That all began to change in the summer of 2003. In an inter-league game against the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, Sammy's bat exploded and Rays catcher Toby Hall picked up the portion of the bat that remained on the ground. He and the umpire immediately noticed the cork, and Sammy was tossed out of the game.

In a post-game press conference he swore he accidentally grabbed the wrong bat. The league supposedly checked the other bats (after the game, after Sammy and/or the Cubs had plenty of time to get rid of any suspicious bats) and found no evidence against him.

That year he didn't make the All-Star team for the first time since 1998. Although after Sammy hit .308 with two home run in the 2003 NL-Championship Series vs. the Marlins, Cub fans seemed ready to forget all about that little corking incident.

But it went downhill fast during the 2004 season. The league instituted new testing for steroids, and suddenly Sammy's was doing his home run hops on balls barely hit to the warning track. During that summer, Sammy sneezed in the clubhouse and injured himself so badly he missed nearly a month of games.

The Cubs fans didn't officially desert him, however, until the team collapsed the last week of the 2004 season. In the final game of the year, Sammy left in a huff before the game was over. His teammates took that opportunity to bash his boombox into pieces with a baseball bat, an ignominious end to his Cubs career.

The Cubs traded Sammy to Baltimore, and he got the last 35 home runs of his major league career with the Orioles and the Rangers. His 600th career home run came against the Cubs in an inter-league game, but the love affair with Chicago was long gone.

Will the all-time home run king of Chicago have his number retired by the Cubs? Will he return one more time to hear the chants of SAMMY, SAMMY, SAMMY? Will he be voted into baseball's Hall of Fame?

Or will he forever remain a tarnished hero; a symbol of baseball's steroids era?