20 Years Ago Today, Mark McGwire Won The Home Run Race
Steroids were so fucking cool.
The whole ’98 season was as much fun as I’ve ever had watching sports. Every morning I’d wake up and check a literal newspaper to see if Griffey, Sosa or Big Mac went deep the night prior. It sounds like I’m talking about the 1930s but I don’t care, internet was slow as hell then you couldn’t even talk on the phone if you were surfing the web. We were all idiots in 1998, all we had was this home run race. And it really felt like one of those three went deep every single night. I can’t imagine how the MLB could ever replicate the level of excitement surrounding this season. Even when Bonds broke it a few years later, it wasn’t the same because he was just chasing a number. It was still crazy and something to marvel, but the fact that two of these three guys were doing it in the same division in the same season just put it on another level entirely.
How I hear about old people talk about the Space Race between the US and the USSR is how I felt when McGwire hit #62. That was my moon landing. That ball just tucking behind the left field wall for his shortest dinger of the season might as well have been hit into orbit. And to do it with Sosa on the same field made it feel like a knockout blow in the 11th round of a heavyweight bout. Like, the Cubs and Cardinals fuckin’ hate each other, and yet when McGwire went yard here the game stopped. Everyone was dapping him up, giving him hugs, it even looks like he gives the catcher a quick smooch on the cheek before picking up his son. It was as transcendent a moment in sports as I think I’ve seen in my 29 years of living.
And while 62 was always the goal, there was still about a month of baseball left to be played. Sosa actually tied McGwire at 62 after he put a beatdown on the Milwaukee Brewers the following series. By September 25th, they were still tied at 65. Sosa took Jose Lima to the moon to give him his 66th and final home run of the season. (Lima gave up four total home runs to both of these guys this season, more than anyone else that season. 3 to Sosa, 1 to McGwire. Clearly he was trying to grease the skids for Sammy.) Mark McGwire, sitting at 65, decided he didn’t just want to be the first to 62. How anticlimactic would it have been to break the home run record only to lose in a few weeks later? McGwire wasn’t having any of it. He hit FIVE home runs in the final series of the season off five different Montreal Expos to give him 70.
Steroids were so goddamn cool.