ONCE UPON A ‘SUMMER’
ESPN DOC LOOKS BACK AT THE MAGICAL BUT TAINTED 1998 HOME-RUN RACE THAT CAPTIVATED BASEBALL
As Major League Baseball owners and players haggle over the details of what is sure to be one of the strangest seasons the summer game has known, ESPN is taking us back 22 years to the then-magical but now-tarnished home-run race between the Cubs’ Sammy Sosa and the Cardinals’ Mark McGwire, who traded booming shots like heavyweight fighters as a captivated nation cheered wildly.
The 30 for 30 documentary ‘‘Long Gone Summer’’ is a feature-length film premiering at 8 p.m. Sunday. And while it’s not a home run when it comes to handling all aspects of this complicated and, in some ways, still polarizing story, it’s a solid line-drive double that captures the madness surrounding the Sosa⁄McGwire battle and features extensive present-day interviews with McGwire and Sosa.
One of them is more forthcoming about the past and willing to take responsibility for his actions than the other. You probably can guess how that goes.
With creative and mood-setting music by Jeff Tweedy underscoring the story, ‘‘Long Gone Summer’’ reminds us baseball was not in a great place heading into the 1998 season. We were just a few years past the disastrous World Series-canceling work stoppage of 1994 — which was particularly painful for us White Sox fans, seeing as how the Sox were atop the American League Central and had the fourth-best record in baseball when the season died. The biggest preseason buzz wasn’t about the division races; it centered on the possibility that Roger Maris’ singleseason record of 61 homers could be broken by McGwire, who hit 58 homers in 1997, or Ken Griffey Jr., who hit 56.
Sammy Sosa? He had a nice power season with 36 homers in 1997, which put him 14th among major-league hitters. In the early part of the season, sports-media attention in Chicago was focused not on Sosa but on 20-yearold rookie phenom Kerry Wood, who on May 6 struck out 20 Astros and allowed only one hit in what some statisticians still claim is the greatest game ever pitched.
Meanwhile, McGwire and Griffey were racking up the homers. At the end of May, McGwire had 27 and Griffey 19. Sosa was still an afterthought with 13.
Then came June, which would be historic. ‘‘If it were meant to be Griffey [challenging McGwire], it would have been Griffey,’’ Sosa says. ‘‘God picked me . . . . When it starts to get warm, that’s me.’’
Says Jim Riggleman, the Cubs’ manager in ‘98: ‘‘He had a month nobody ever had.’’
In “Long Gone Summer,” AJ Schnack does a fine job of capturing the excitement at Wrigley Field and throughout baseball as Sosa hit a record 20 homers in June. We hear the real-time calls of McGwire’s and Sosa’s homers and see the fans in Chicago scrambling for Sosa’s homers on Waveland Avenue, while Cardinals fans look on in awe as McGwire sends moon shots deep into the stands. By the end of June, McGwire had 37 homers, Griffey 33 and Sosa 33, as well.
Junior eventually would tail off, finishing with ‘‘only’’ 56, as the stage cleared for the titanic battle between McGwire and Sosa that lasted until the last weekend of the season.
The documentary adds historical perspective by revisiting the 1961 season, when Maris was chasing Babe Ruth’s record of 60 and felt such pressure that his hair began falling out.
Then, finally, we get to the PED elephant in the room.
Associated Press reporter Steve Wilstein sees a bottle of ‘‘Andro,’’ a legal alternative to steroids, on the shelf in McGwire’s locker. Just out there. McGwire tells the media he needs it to recover from injuries and says, ‘‘There’s absolutely nothing wrong with it.’’
Brady Anderson, who had hit an inexplicable 50 homers in 1996 and never reached half that number in his 14 other seasons, is seen on camera at the time, saying, ‘‘Creatine training . . . is a big part of being able to go out there and play every day.’’
Commissioner Bud Selig and the head of the players’ union issued a statement saying the coverage focusing on these supplements was ‘‘inappropriate’’ and was taking away from the home-run race. For the time being and for the most part, that was that. We didn’t want to look too hard into this stuff or ask questions about how certain players were experiencing Hulk-like transformations.
‘‘In retrospect, there was a price to pay for it,’’ Bob Costas says.
McGwire, who in 2010 finally admitted using steroids during the 1998 season, has been welcomed into the Cardinals’ Hall of
Fame and has had coaching gigs with the Cardinals, Dodgers and Padres. But he never received more than 23.7% of the vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame and says: ‘‘I’m paying the consequences. Still do.’’
As for Sosa, he’s a continually upbeat presence in the interviews, laughing and smiling — and still refusing to be contrite.
‘‘Everybody in that era did it,’’ he says with a chuckle. ‘‘I’m a very happy person, my friend. I’m good. I’m happy.’’
I would have liked to hear from some of the stars from that era who never took steroids. How did they feel then and how do they feel now about competing on an unbalanced playing field? On balance, though, ‘‘Long Gone Summer’’ is a valuable time capsule about a movie-like dream season with a nightmare of an epilogue. ✶