In the Marvel Cinematic Universe, movie lovers are thrilled to see Iron Man and Thor defeat the bad guys with their superpowers. It brings joy to their lives in an instant, good defeating evil and life seems better, if only for just a little while. That's how I look at the summer of 1998 and the home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa: Two superheroes saving the day.
Documented eloquently and tautly, A.J. Schnack's ESPN 30 for 30 documentary, "Long Gone Summer," places the baseball right back in the thick of the home run record chase between the larger-than-life Paul Bunyan-forearmed Mark McGwire and the charismatic underdog, Sosa. A St. Louis Cardinal and Chicago Cub going head to head for Roger Maris' bittersweet single season home run record of 61.
I mention bittersweet because in order to acquire that new record, Maris went through the inferno personally. He had to go through not only Babe Ruth (who held the record at the time with 60), but all of his adoring fans. It's one thing when the majority of baseball fans root for you to fail; Maris felt the heat from his own city, Yankees' fans. When he did it, Maris saw it as more of a curse. That's how most people view the record today, held by Barry Bonds' 73 in 2001.
Before Bonds could get his hands on it, as well as the all time home run record, it was Big Mac and Slammin' Sammy. One guy from the warm and comforting hills of Southern California and the other from the poverty-stricken streets of a small city in the Dominican Republic called San Pedro De Macoris. What the documentary does very well is acquire an instant sense of place, filtering the highlights and flashbacks with shots of St. Louis and Chicago today. For St. Louis, it's a different stadium, one not adjourned with arches on its roof, just the big one standing tall behind it.
You get candid interviews from Mike Bush, Bob Costas, Chip Caray, Bernie Miklasz, Monica Adams, Jenifer Langosch, Paul Sullivan and more. McGwire and Sosa also provide commentary on their momentous season, which comes off as a day at the park from the previous weekend.
Like a drug rushing into your system to ease pain, "Long Lost Summer" provides a graceful suture to the maddening state that 2020 has put us in.
For me, it takes me back to the glorious free-falling days of working behind the manual scoreboard at Busch Stadium 2.0. 1998 was my first season and you could easily say it held the greatest collection of memories spent behind that board. We chronicled the chase with our own game slot held just for the McGwire-Sosa home run chase. Our supervisor, Joe Gramen, may have hogged the duty of changing those numbers out as the heat increased and the chase cracked on into August and September-but we were all a part of something special.
For some, that special feeling has evaporated into sadness and for some, anger.
There are baseball purists out there who now despise the 1998 home run chase and everything it stood for. Because when something good happens in this world, the rush to find dirt and a way to cripple the joy always seems to pick up speed and happens real fast. "It must not be true" takes over. It was only a few years later that the New York Times found a list of players who used performance-enhancing drugs in a voluntary test. Other reports came out, and McGwire and Sosa were both on it.
While some feel differently about 1998 now, I don't. My thoughts haven't changed. I was there for nearly all of McGwire's 38 home runs at Busch 2.0. I saw it all, experienced every moment, and took it in. These days, I still applaud what that summer did for baseball. Before that home run chase, baseball was dying. It was in a true place of decay. The 1994 strike had demolished a lot of the goodwill in a game that was already suffering. Electrifying players like Ken Griffey Jr. couldn't hold it up. Things were bad and the home run race brought fans back to the game.
Stadiums were full, people got back into the game, and new souls found the game at a very young age. There's a moment in the documentary where Caray, the grandson of Hall of Fame announcer Harry Caray, noted how emotionally important that chase was. He talked about looking over at the late Jack Buck right after McGwire hit number 62, noticing Buck had tears streaming down his face. Right there, Caray said, he knew how large the effect of this race was.
Would you take that away for moral high ground? I can respect it if you do, but please don't try to take the enjoyment from someone else's memory away. That's where a lot of people go wrong. I look back and see dozens of memories for people who were probably struggling in life and needed a respite. They needed a boost from something. What they got was a couple of superheroes rescuing the game of baseball, which was spiraling.
Like moviegoers watching seemingly normal people save the day with amazing superpowers, baseball fans strapped themselves in for the ride of a lifetime that season. Some would take it back; many others would prefer to keep it I think. In my eyes, you are never going to correctly justify the means of which that summer was based on, performance-wise. Baseball wasn't regulating the use of PED, so why do fans need to go there? People who watched Bonds break the record in San Francisco probably cherish those memories too. He didn't have a Sosa to rival his run that summer, but Bay Area fans wouldn't trade it in.
If we want to play that game, let's dissect the history of the game, at least from 1980-2005. Let's collect all the culprits. This could take a while, because a lot of players could have been taking something to get an edge on the competition. If you are up for that investigation, have some fun. I'll choose to admire what happened and leave the moral high horse-riding activity to others who need to debunk a myth.
As Miklasz, a columnist for the St. Louis Post Dispatch at the time, noted in the documentary, "what good does the blame game do?" If I want to blame anyone, it'll be the owners and officials who regulated the game. The ones who most certainly knew something was happening and did nothing to stop it. They saw dollar bills coming out of the ground like green grass, so they stood down. If you want to be mad at someone, be mad at them.
I'll hold the memories of 1998 close to the chest. I can recognize the stain of the actions, but I won't trade them for a higher place to stand morally. Without a 100% effective way to weed out the good and the bad, it's a tiresome endeavor that is a fool's errand. As I watched this documentary unfold and the thrilling hunt for 62 boil down to one weekend in St. Louis in September, I wasn't thinking about wearing sunglasses or averting my eyes. I was leaned up in my bed, glued to the screen, and in the moment.
On the night of 62, I missed McGwire's first at-bat. Traffic was so bad because St. Louis had turned into a tourist attraction or the site of the latest human invention. I got there right as 62 sailed over the wall. I listened as old Busch literally shook around, like the Old Barn on Oakland Avenue. I smiled and recognized that something incredible had just happened.
And then there was McGwire and Sosa hugging on the field and doing their respective post-home run rituals, punching each other's stomachs and blowing kisses in the air. They were smiling. Fans were smiling. Buck was crying. Many others were crying. 22 years later, I think a lot of those tears would still stream.
What those two players, two superheroes, did for the game that night should never be forgotten. They brought people back. Bonds didn't do that. Mike Trout and Clayton Kershaw couldn't do that. McGwire and Sosa did, and that is more important than some half-hearted goose chase into a blame game room with no windows. They destroyed the bad that had crept into the game.
What kind of evil? Greed. A hunger for money that had denied baseball a World Series champion in 1994. A greedy seminar that is once again threatening to eliminate baseball games in 2020. A battle between rich people deciding how many millions of dollars is worthwhile to give people this beautifully rich and compelling game. McGwire and Sosa helped erase that evil back in 1998, using means that would later, when baseball finally decided to regulate usage, be known as illegal.
Let me tell you something. When baseball returns, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa won't be around to save it. Not this time. Answer me this question: would you use one of those time traveling devices designed by Tony Stark to bring them to the present to fix things again? Or would that be too much for you?
Thank you goes to A.J Schnack for evoking all those memories again. "Long Lost Summer" was the baseball injection (no pun intended) I needed this year.
It is currently streaming on ESPN Plus.