Memories of ’98 are not long gone
McGwire-Sosa duel was big hit with Pirates, fans
The Pirates didn’t give their fans a ton to get excited about in 1998. Kevin Young had a career year with 27 home runs and 108 RBIs. Jason Kendall hit .327, Turner Ward literally ran through a wall, and Francisco Cordova pitched to a 3.31 ERA.
Not bad, any of it. Maybe better than expected.
But by late August, attention had shifted toward the magical home run chance at hand, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa together running down Roger Maris’ 37-year-old record of 61 home runs.
McGwire and Sosa combined to hit five of their 136 home runs that summer against the Pirates. Two of them resulted in standing ovations and curtain calls at Three Rivers Stadium.
“You make a mistake,” Jason Kendall said Monday by phone, “and it got loud.”
There are so many magical memories from that season, which became a talking point nationally with ESPN airing Sunday night of its “Long Gone Summer” documentary, but one of the biggest locally was the adoration the two sluggers received. It was so much, apparently, that McGwire felt a little awkward when he was basically adopted by another city’s fans.
“With all due respect to the Pirates, I hope they didn’t mind it.
That’s why I don’t feel comfortable doing it,” McGwire said after his curtain call Aug. 23, 1998, which followed an eighth-inning homer off Ricardo Rincon. “But they kept clapping for me, and so I did it.”
“It’s a wonderful thing to see,” added Cardinals manager Tony La Russa. “It shows they appreciate what this guy is doing.”
McGwire appeared in 11 games against the Pirates in 1998 and hit .433 with 3 home runs, 3 doubles, 7 RBIs and 10 runs scored. The Pirates walked McGwire 15 times. They had more success against Sosa, who hit .250 in 10 games and 2 homers. Although he hit 66 home runs (McGwire had 70), it’s easy to forget that Sosa led Major League Baseball with 171 strikeouts that summer.
Things actually started slow for the two National League Central Division sluggers; McGwire was the first to homer against the Pirates, and that didn’t come until Aug. 22, off Francisco Cordova.
Fans at Three Rivers Stadium — more than 115,000 total, including the Pirates’ first back-to-back regular season sellouts — had an interesting experience over that three-game series. The Cardinals arrived in Pittsburgh around 4 a.m. Saturday morning, prompting La Russa to cancel batting practice.
It didn’t matter much for McGwire, who smacked his 52nd in the first inning to become the first player in major league history to homer that many times before Sept. 1. The ball traveled 477 feet.
After a 17-game lull, where McGwire homered just twice, the shot off Cordova was McGwire’s fifth in a sixgame stretch.
“It amazes me how everyone wants a piece of him,“Kendall said at the time. ”This game is hard enough as it is, and he has to block all the stuff he’s going through out to go out and do his job. It’s amazing what he has done for the game.”
Penguins co-owner Mario Lemieux attended the second game of that series — when McGwire homered off Rincon in a 4-3 Pirates victory before 42,134 — and dropped in the visitors’ clubhouse to meet McGwire. Lemieux got a signed bat; McGwire got a signed hockey stick.
“That’s pretty cool,” McGwire told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Bob Smizik, “because my son is a hockey fan.”
Pirates pitchers — if they didn’t give McGwire something good to hit — were booed. So was John Mabry, who started at first base for the final game of the series, with La Russa resting McGwire.
‘’I don’t blame the fans,’’ Mabry said. ‘’They wanted to see Mark hit. It’s like paying to see Elvis and getting a garage band instead.’’
McGwire hit his third home run against the Pirates Sept. 15, cranking a 1-0 fastball from Jason Christiansen for No. 63 of the season. McGwire broke Maris’ record on Sept. 8.
Although he didn’t experience as much success as McGwire against the Pirates, Sosa’s appearances were met with the same sort of excitement. His first homer (No. 56 on the season) came off Jason Schmidt on Sept. 4, in a 5-2 Cubs win. Sosa drove a 2-0 fastball 401 feet to right-center field to pull within two home runs of McGwire at the time.
Fans showered Sosa with cheers. “I feel like I’m in my house right now,” Sosa said of the reception he received.
Three Rivers Stadium, however, was not completely slanted toward Sosa. Knowing Sosa did not want to learn what McGwire had done until afterward, the in-game staff would show McGwire’s at-bats on the video board, reportedly annoying Sosa and the Cubs.
Gene Lamont, the Pirates manager at the time, insisted the Pirates wanted to be aggressive with both Sosa and McGwire, giving them a “legitimate chance to get the record.”
That seemed to track with Schmidt, who fell behind in the count.
“My game is to go right after guys,” Schmidt told the Post-Gazette’s Paul Meyer. “If he takes me deep, he takes me deep. On 2-0, he’s probably looking heater there. I figured I could power one by him.”
Sosa’s second homer against the Pirates came off rookie left-hander Sean Lawrence — who had just eight innings of major league experience — the next night, his ninth in 13 games, helping the Cubs to an 8-4 victory.
Even Pirates players became fans, Kendall said. It was hardly uncommon for a group of them to emerge from the home clubhouse and watch McGwire or Sosa take batting practice.
“I remember Three Rivers being packed for BP,” Kendall said. “Some of our players even went out. I’d say to them, ‘What are you gonna do? Watch to see how far they’re going to hit a ball off you later?’ ”
Kendall remembered the state of baseball at the time and likened it to right now, when fans are upset over the ongoing labor dispute. Back then, baseball badly needed McGwire vs. Sosa and could require something similar again soon.
“People were [ticked],” Kendall said. “They weren’t going to watch baseball anymore. Then all of a sudden something like Sosa-McGwire comes along, people are all locked in again, and those two are getting standing ovations at visitors’ parks.”