Projo Sports Blog

By JOSH ROBBINS
The Orlando Sentinel

Big Mac and Slammin' Sammy.

Ten years ago, they captivated a nation with an unprecedented combination of brute force, grace under pressure and sheer joy. For one glorious summer, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased Roger Maris' single-season home run record.

At a time when Major League Baseball was suffering through a popularity hangover from the 1994 work stoppage, McGwire and Sosa were the perfect tonic. Thousands of fans showed up at ballparks hours early just to watch McGwire take batting practice.

"The suicide squeeze is cool, and the double steal is all right," a Time magazine cover story began, "but a guy who can smack the bejeezus out of a ball-that's the guy for us."

When McGwire hit his 62nd homer on Sept. 8, 1998, a low line drive that barely cleared Busch Stadium's left-field fence, he set off a celebration across the country. By season's end, Sosa also eclipsed Maris' magical mark.

McGwire finished with 70 home runs. Sosa hit 66. Baseball had never seen anything like it.

Sports Illustrated later named them Sportsmen of the Year. And to commemorate the occasion, they appeared on the magazine's cover dressed in Greek togas, which left their massive biceps and forearms exposed.

A decade of perspective, accusations and innuendo have tamed the party. America celebrated their muscles then, but not anymore. Fairly or unfairly, yesterday's home run heroes have become symbols of baseball's steroids era.

"What was hailed as a momentous event in baseball history in 1998, certainly you can't reach that same conclusion today," said Tim McCarver, a former all-star catcher and now Fox Sports' lead baseball analyst. "It's pretty clear that most baseball fans and most historians who write about the game do not reach the same conclusions about those remarkable feats today that they did in 1998."

Jose Canseco has claimed he personally injected McGwire with steroids. McGwire himself refused to answer whether he used steroids when a congressional committee grilled him under oath in 2005. "I'm not here to talk about the past," he told them repeatedly, choking back tears.

The same day as McGwire's testimony, Sosa denied ever using performance-enhancing drugs, but he seemed cut down to size when his attorney read his opening statement to the committee, even though Sosa speaks English.

Suspicion still follows both players.

McGwire has been eligible for the Hall of Fame in each of the past two years, but his vote totals weren't close to the needed standard. This year he was named on only 23.6 percent of the ballots cast. To be elected, a former player must receive at least 75 percent of the vote.

Last year Sosa hit .252 with 21 home runs and 92 RBIs for the Texas Rangers. Those are respectable power numbers, but no team wanted to sign Sosa for 2008 after the Rangers said they wanted him back, but only in a reduced role.

While it's possible teams were scared off by his age (39), it's also possible general managers avoided signing him because of the distractions that would surround him. Because almost every team witnessed first-hand the circus that followed Barry Bonds, baseball's scarred home run king.

David Ezra, a lawyer in California who recently wrote about Bonds in his book Asterisk: Home Runs, Steroids, and the Rush to Judgment, said the case against Sosa is circumstantial.

"I think you're making gigantic assumptions to say that because a guy worked out with weights and added some muscle and had some really good years that we should just assume that he was a product of steroids and wouldn't have been good without them," Ezra said. "I think that's a huge leap in the case of Sammy Sosa."

One could argue McGwire and Sosa have suffered more than the game itself. While no one doubts that baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association sustained black eyes for not having a steroids testing program in the 1990s, the game is thriving financially.

MLB drew 79.5 million people to games last year, the fourth season in a row of attendance records. The league also has set revenue records for five consecutive years. It generated $6.1 billion in 2007.

More records may come. In June, Commissioner Bud Selig told the Sentinel he expects attendance this season to reach somewhere between 80 million and 81 million and revenues to exceed $6.5 billion.

The Sports Business Journal last week reported that MLB's television ratings for the first half of this season were down across the board - 16.7 percent on Fox, 8.5 percent on ESPN. Ratings on SunSports and FSN Florida for Marlins and Rays games are up.
"The sport has never been this popular," Selig said. "The growth, particularly in the last five to 10 years, has been stunning, even to me."

David Vincent, a member of the Society for American Baseball Research and author of Home Run: The Definitive History of Baseball's Ultimate Weapon, said he still has fond memories of the 1998 home-run chase.

"People seem to forget that McGwire was a big-time home-run hitter right from the start," Vincent said. "He hit 49 home runs his rookie year, and the only reason he didn't hit a 50th home run was because he went home for that last weekend to be with his wife, who was delivering a baby."

Vincent added that pitchers, as well as hitters, also used performance-enhancing drugs during the 1990s. He argued that a narrower strike zone and new ballparks that played smaller contributed to the home-run surge of the late '90s.

Yet the Mitchell Report-the MLB-commissioned investigation of performance-enhancing drugs-indicates that steroids use was rampant in the major leagues in the '90s and early years of this decade. To McCarver, that can't be ignored.

Shortly after the 1998 season ended, McCarver wrote a book, The Perfect Season: Why 1998 Was Baseball's Greatest Year.

Now, McCarver concedes the chase wasn't as perfect as it seemed.

"It was an era that was tainted with steroids," he said. "It's pretty simple. That's been the era since the early '90s. I don't think that anybody, any baseball fan, can look at it without thinking about the era. It was done, but it was done in tainted fashion."

 Tags  Major League Baseball Mark McGwire Sammy Sosa steroids

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