Going Deep
The Carefree Days of Summer
Ended with the 1998 Baseball Season
I look back on the summer of 1998 with hatred.
At this time nine years ago, Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa were making history with each baseball they hit out of the park. It was supposed to be an unreachable feat. Sixty-one home runs in one season? It hadn’t been done in nearly 40 years. But against all odds, the two of them reached incredible heights in the home run category and toppled Roger Maris’ record by putting up gargantuan numbers.Finally, I had something to say to my dad and my grandfather when they told me about Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays and all the other great ballplayers of their time. I could say I witnessed perhaps the greatest summer in baseball history. A summer that made me feel proud to live in this era, and more important, a summer that put baseball back on the map.
At that point, major league baseball was four years removed from a 1994 strike that cut the season short and canceled the World Series. Attendance at baseball games was down. Television ratings had plummeted and enthusiasm for the game was depleted.
But two players who were different in culture, skin color and native languages came together like brothers and carried the game on their broad shoulders back to where it was before. Everywhere they went, fans filled the bleachers and got their cameras ready to capture history in the making.
Too bad they cheated. Too bad baseball looked the other way. And too bad steroids have become so prevalent since then that fans no longer know what to believe when they look on the back of a baseball card.
What’s most amazing about that 1998 season is how far Sosa and McGwire have fallen since then. Who would’ve believed in 1998 that neither Sosa nor McGwire would get into the Hall of Fame? Well, it’s very possible now that they won't.
Shockingly, neither will be remembered for how they resurrected baseball, because of a very uncomfortable steroid hearing in March 2005. All of a sudden, Sosa forgot how to speak English and needed an interpreter to answer tough steroid questions for him. McGwire didn’t do much better.
“I’m not here to talk about the past,” McGwire said as he dodged question after question about whether or not he used steroids. “I’m here to be positive about the future.”
Well, Mark, the future is anything but positive. In fact, it’s more decayed than ever before.
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Barry Bonds is perhaps the greatest power hitter of all time and the single-season home run record holder after hitting 73 in 2003. Now he's closing in on the most hallowed mark in sports, and nobody outside of San Francisco even cares. Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig said he won’t even show up when Bonds breaks Hank Aaron’s career home run record of 755. Aaron himself said he has no interest in being at the ballpark. It may seem sad, but that’s the harsh reality of baseball today. While Bonds limps toward his final days as a baseball player, Selig and his crew sprint to round up enough evidence to convict Bonds and somehow flip the “off” switch on his pursuit of history.
But if Selig wants to get mad at somebody for what has happened to America’s pastime, he needs to look in the mirror. There’s no way the commissioner of baseball didn’t know what was going on with steroids. The reason they didn’t do anything about it was because of the impact Sosa and McGwire were having on the game and the new interest people all over the world were taking. They were desperate. They needed to find a way to get fans back into the game, and “The Bash Brothers” were creating such a buzz that the league didn’t dare mess with it.
Now, the game that survived two world wars, a stock-market crash, the ‘60s and even disco is struggling to stay up because of how big the hierarchy of baseball let the issue of steroids become. It’s not the players’ fault. How would you feel if somebody in your line of work was getting promotions and a bigger salary because he or she was cheating? Wouldn’t you be tempted to do the same?
Believe it or not, the magical summer of 1998 and the summer in front of us right now are very similar: A baseball player is going after an elusive home run record facilitated by illegal substances he took.
The only difference is, now we know about it.
Alden Gonzalez is a student in UF’s College of Journalism. He may be contacted at alden@towerpublications.com.
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