No light shed on 1998’s duel in the sun
The documentary attempts to make the chase be about ... some idolized version of America.
For more than a decade, ESPN’s “30 for 30” series has turned out provocative, nuanced sports documentaries that take a particular moment in sports history and provide it with context and deeper understanding.
Don’t count “Long Gone Summer” in that description.
The documentary on the summer of 1998’s home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa that aired
Sunday night was a dud. A romanticized, whitewashed version of a tainted competition that doesn’t delve into the lack of authenticity of the event until 103 minutes into the twohour documentary.
In that way, the documentary feels almost like it has the current blessing of Major League Baseball.
Because baseball might need some more artificially enhanced excitement whenever it eventually gets back to playing the game. As the sport drives itself over the cliff once again, it’s worth remembering that it was
the McGwireSosa home run chase that “saved” baseball from itself after the 1994 strike (though, a few years later, the residue of the home run chase helped the sport implode again).
With team owners repackaging the same proposal again last week, and the players again rejecting it Saturday, it looks like greed and animosity will be the winners as they so often are. Commissioner Rob Manfred may impose a truncated 48game season. Or, as Manfred told ESPN on Monday, there might not be a 2020 season at all.
So, add some more asterisks to the baseball record books that are either actually or metaphorically already full of them.
If Sunday night was an indication, perhaps we can look for a future documentary romanticizing the pandemic standoff.
“Long Gone Summer” was made by a selfprofessed Cardinals fan. However, filmmaker AJ Schnack was not 7 years old in 1998 but instead was 30 and should have brought a little bit more perspective to the subject.
The opening starts with Todd McFarlane, the comic book maven, cataloging all his collector baseballs, including McGwire’s No. 70, for which he paid almost $3 million. This fact is presented unironically, as is the intonation that the home run chase was “bigger than sports.”
Not really. At the time, the chase was all about sports: fun, distracting summer entertainment that infiltrated every corner of American life for a few weeks. No one thought it meant anything more, that there was a grander takeaway besides enjoying the competition. It became “bigger than sports” only in retrospect, when the chase became a lesson in cheating, greed and obfuscation.
But the documentary attempts to make the chase be about something more, about some idealized version of America. There’s even a manufactured shot of kids riding in a car listening to the home run chase on the radio: The car’s dashboard appears to be from the early 1960s and no one is wearing seat belts. Reminder: The chase took place in 1998. When cars had digital radios and CD players and all 50 states had seat belt laws.
That’s only one of the unintentionally amusing things about the documentary. McGwire describes his approach as “see ball, hit ball.” Sosa says, “God picked me,” instead of Ken Griffey Jr., to duel with McGwire. No context. No nuance. Just divine interference.
Tony La Russa, McGwire’s manager with both the A’s and Cardinals, is shown saying he didn’t know about the personal goals that McGwire wrote down every season, even though “we were as close as we can be, familywise.” LaRussa also has claimed he never knew about McGwire’s steroid use, though he spent a lot of energy vilifying every other disclosed cheater who came along.
Somehow, we’re supposed to sympathize with McGwire, who was assigned two security guards and had to leave buildings by the back entrance because of the crowds that swarmed him. Seems like it might have been a good time to mention what Hank Aaron went through when he was chasing another home run record: Babe Ruth’s career mark. Aaron had to have security guards, too, because people were threatening to kill him and his family, because he was a black man on the verge of breaking Ruth’s record.
When a bottle of androstenedione is spotted by a reporter in McGwire’s locker — don’t forget dozens of reporters were crowding around that locker on a daily basis and it was clearly visible — there’s no mention of how vilified that reporter, Steve Wilstein, was. But it is telling that when McGwire asked the company that made the product to publicly back him, it declined.
That’s because the use of testosterone enhancers — both the legal ones and the illegal ones — was shameful. Secretive.
When the 70th home run is hit on the final day of the season, the Cardinals’ announcers crow that the number will stand “for years.” Well, three to be exact. Barry Bonds broke the record in 2001, with his own tainted chase.
I’m not a filmmaker, but I know the best documentaries are layered with context and insight. Sports is a rich canvas: “30 for 30” films like “The Two Escobars” or “June 17th, 1994” take moments in time and tell a bigger story.
In the final minutes of “Long Gone Summer,” the steroid shame and the aftermath of the chase is finally discussed. Sosa is relatively defiant. McGwire, who held three different coaching jobs in baseball, comes off as victimized.
“It sort of sucked,” he says. Without saying exactly what sucked.