Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1551: The 1998 Home Run Race Revisited

Episode Date: June 15, 2020

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller interview AJ Shnack, the director of ESPN’s new 30 for 30 documentary about the 1998 home run race, Long Gone Summer, touching on the involvement of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, how AJ structured the story, which slugger was the star of the race, the myth that the home run […]

Went to a ball game the other day, skinny guys in baggy pants, hooray! Pitchers duel, it was one-to-one, seen a bunt and a steal and a hit-and-run. I miss the steroid era, I miss the good old days. the good old days. Sammy Sosa hitting 60 a year. Old guys hitting bombs at the end of their career. I miss the steroid era. I miss the good old days. Hello and welcome to episode 1551 of Effectively Wild, a baseball podcast from Fangraphs presented by our Patreon supporters. I am Ben Lindberg of The Ringer, and I will be joined in just a moment by Sam Miller of ESPN, as well as A.J. Schnock, the director of ESPN's 30 for 30 documentary Long Gone Summer, which we will be spending this entire episode discussing.

So on Sunday night, ESPN aired Long Gone Summer. It's the story of the 1998 home run race, both what it was like in the moment and what we think of it now. So Sam and I are going to interview AJ, the director. And then after that interview, Sam and I will have a discussion about our memories of that, and there are a few short snippets of me expounding on something or other. I wasn't otherwise involved in the production, and I wasn't paid to appear, but just thought I should state that up top. So let's get started with our interview segment. So we are joined now by the director of Long Gone Summer, A.J. Schnock. Hey, A.J., congrats on the release, and thanks for coming on. Thank you, guys. Hey, AJ, congrats on the release and thanks for coming on.

Thank you, guys. So I assume that proceeding with a documentary like this was contingent on the participation of McGuire and Sosa. So were they at all reluctant to take part? And did you have any hope that they'd be more reflective or forthcoming about their PD use? I mean, first of all, yeah, that was definitely a thing that we talked about with ESPN was, you know, That was definitely a thing that we talked about with ESPN was, you know, how do you get these two guys who, you know, McGuire is never like doing anything of like a long form interview, you know, and Sosa hasn't been doing much press of late in recent years. So how do you get both of them to, you know, not just sit down, but sit down for the length of time that, you know, we wanted them to do it. it down for the length of time that, you know, we wanted them to do it. So that was definitely part of the initial conversations and the work that, you know, we did for more than a year, actually, just to kind of get them both on board. In terms of, you know, dealing with steroids and their PED use or alleged PED use, you know, with McGuire, I always felt that he, you know,

he had said pretty clearly, you know, in his Costas interview and in other interviews that he did before rejoining the Cardinals as a coach, you know, what he had done, when he had done it and how he felt it had or hadn't affected his performance. I wasn't sure what Sammy was going to say when I asked him. I know he feels very proud of his accomplishments and feels insulted that people view it within this frame. So, you know, I did think he said something that I had not heard him say before, but I didn't expect him to change his story, which is that he, you know, didn't what he said to Congress, which is that he didn't use. Were there any questions that they just didn't answer? You asked a question and they just didn't want to go there?

No, I, you know, I told him kind of going in that, you know, we were going to talk about everything. We were going to talk about the season, talk about their previous history in the game. And, you know, that was one of the things in talking to Mark that he, you know, pretty much 20 minutes into the first interview was talking about the fact that he'd been in therapy, that he had kept these lists of things he expected from himself to accomplish, and then puts them in a safe and doesn't look at it again until the end of the season. And these were things that I was pretty sure were not common information. So hearing him talk like that, you know, especially knowing his reluctance to do, you know, big interviews, I felt really good that he was, you know, coming into this process with, you know,

the decision that he was going to be as open as possible. Did you talk to Tony La Russa about that aspect of the story at all? Just because he was with McGuire in Oakland during the Bash brothers years, he was with them again in St. Louis. And of course, he's in the Hall of Fame. And some people will say, well, if you're going to keep some of these players out because of their PD use or suspected PD use, then how do you not hold the manager who was there the whole time accountable? So I wonder

if that came up at all or whether you just sort of stuck to the performance with him. No, I asked him about it. I asked him also about Andrew because he had sort of famously criticized the AP reporter who had written the story. You know, I thought his answer about the steroids question was basically that Mark is a good guy and has proven in other ways that he has good character and that that overcomes the mistakes that he might have made. There were moments when that was in the film, but, you know, in the end, it's, I thought it was more compelling

to let other people dissect, you know, how the season is viewed now. I mean, part of, you know, with any kind of story, it's ultimately, it becomes a story that everybody has ownership of, because it was how it affected them at the time and how it affects them now. So we wanted to go with the approach of letting a variety of voices, you know, kind of break down not just what was happening at the time, but how they feel about, you know, whether or not it completely invalidates either their experience of that season or, you know, the actual achievements of that season. of that season or, you know, the actual achievements of that season. It's so interesting to talk about, you know, that era these days, because like in some ways, players who were implicated, a lot of them not only are forgiven, but, you know,

became beloved figures in the sport. Bartolo Colon was suspended and became one of the most beloved figures in the sport. And Jason Giambi was and dozens and dozens of players have been implicated and it's just more or less forgotten about and I don't there are other players for whom it still is a big part of their legacy and that you get the sense that they're still not that comfortable with it I thought the the most fascinating part of the documentary was when you get to Andro and Mark McGuire is still sort of like complaining bitterly about the way that the Andro was was reported on at the time, because as he still is saying, like, oh, it was it was legal. There was there was no rule against Andro at the time. And you're like, yeah, but also you were doing you were doing steroids. It's a strange way that we're still not sure whether to cast players from that

era as victims of a witch hunt or perpetrators of a fraud. And I don't think the broad public has necessarily agreed on which one it is. And in particular, even with specific players, we treat it differently. And I felt coming out of the documentary that one of the things that you really come away with is that Sammy Sosa and Mark McGuire still aren't really that comfortable being like open about it. Like they still aren't quite sure how it's going to be treated. Do you think that that's just because of their role in history? If they had each ended up with 58 home runs, do you think that they would have a different perspective on that era? Yeah, I think for sure. I think they've certainly been held to a different

level of responsibility or blame for what occurred during that era. You know, I think because, you know, because it reached such heights, it can also reach, you know, such depths on the other end of it. You know, one of the things I hope that we were, you know, able to do was to, you know, you talked about the Andro and just to frame the era

a little bit differently for people who don't remember the fact that it was such a sea change to go into the nineties from the teams we had seen in the eighties in terms of people embracing this kind of body builder, gym culture of bulking up and adding on muscle mass and, you know, doing all these supplements wide open, you know, creatine was, you know, doing all these supplements wide open, you know,

creatine was, you know, one of the more prominent ones. But, you know, the fact that a lot of this was right there in front of us, you know, I think it was something that, you know, people maybe felt either that they should have seen it coming or that they should have known that it was going on. I think there are a variety of reasons why people felt after the fact, like, why didn't I know I was being tricked or misled? And maybe that's why, you know, people had have still lingering either anger or confliction about how they feel about these two guys, as opposed to, you know, we know that lots

of players were doing it. Pitchers were doing it, hitters were doing it. There were no set rules that were subject to penalty or subject to testing. Yeah, definitely the ones who did the most are the ones who are feeling the most blowback, for sure. blowback, for sure. Yeah, and I wonder whether you thought about talking to or tried to talk to Ken Griffey Jr. or Barry Bonds Griffey because he was part of the early stretch of this race and because he hit 56 in back-to-back years. And if you believe that Griffey was clean and that McGuire and Sosa were not and that they hit as many homers as they did because they were not, then you could think that maybe Griffey would have reason to be bitter about this. And of course, with Bonds, the story goes that he was overshadowed during that home run race and that that's part of what prompted him to start taking PEDs. So I wonder whether that was a consideration. Yeah, I never thought about Bonds because I really wanted to focus on that season

and again, reminding people how big the season felt at the time and how it, you know, captivated the country in a way that sports hadn't in a while and maybe hasn't since. So that was, that was kind of the focus in terms of the interviews that we thought out. We did try to get Griffey and, and, you know, weren't successful. You know, now though, I look at the two hours of real estate that we had and, you know, even just telling the story of these two guys and their backgrounds, you know, it would have it would have been a real challenge to fit in and do justice to Griffey's storyline, because, you know, you'd want to talk about how the race was seen in Seattle and, you know, how he felt both then and after after the fact. and how he felt both then and after the fact. I certainly, one question I would love to ask Griffey is, now that we see the ball wound a little bit tighter and people hitting the home runs that they're hitting now,

what would he be capable of if he was playing in 2020 as opposed to 1997, 1998? I'm curious about how you decided to structure the documentary, because I kept wondering, you know, when is he going to get into the steroid stuff? It's sort of looming there as you watch the rest. And you mentioned the Andro affair about 47 minutes in, and then I think it's not until the hour 30 mark that you have Bob Costas saying, but there was a price to pay, and then the rest is steroid stuff. So it sort of mirrored the way that we experienced the story in the moment, where it was fun and innocent. And then only later did we learn about these other

aspects. But you could have laid out the whole arc of the story from the start and foreshadowed this and said, this is great. But then later it kind of changed, but you chose not to do that. And I wonder why. I mean, in a way, I felt it was sort of rewarding. If we had started off with like, you know, hey, this is a controversial story of steroids, you know, I mean, that is the frame that we're in right now. Like, everyone looks back at 98 feeling conflicted because they know what was happening during the steroid era. So it was a real goal for me to try to put the viewer back into a place where they were experiencing it as if it's in real time and what the emotion felt like. And I really did look at the Andro section as, okay, these are, here's the first real signs that we're seeing something that is different, you know, that we

don't know all of the information about what's going on on the field. But yeah, to me, it felt, I also didn't want to make it seem like we knew more than the people who are living it. You know, it's like, it's a kind of, it's a level of judgment as a filmmaker, if I'm saying like, hey, you're all smarter than these people who are in the moment, you know, to recreate how big it was and how it became a sort of national conversation. It was important to me to kind of strip away the haze as much as I could, and then, you know, be able to unpack it. And maybe then you can unpack it in a way that looks at it slightly differently than your priors coming into it. Well, you also don't, there's so much about that era that we actually still don't know.

And so in some sense, it would be hard to get really deep into like the, here's what was actually going on sort of darker underbelly side when what we really know is pretty vague you know vague strokes about like well there was a lot of cheating going on we know mark mcguire's kind of apologized for things but like we don't know like what day he was going into what closet or whatever and doing what and so it's hard to make it a lot more specific than a broad sort of like, well, as you do at the end, like to say, well, okay, so we've seen what we just watched and there's a lot we don't know about it. Yeah, I mean, I think that's true.

The questions that we have about that era are still, a lot of them are still there. Again, I think the biggest one being is that we don't know just who was and who wasn't, and we probably never will. I think there was something that Steve Traxell said in his interview that we didn't get to use, where he said, no, I've come to just the acceptance that I can only know about myself. I know that I didn't use, and that's all I can say. I don't know about anyone else in the game. So that's the looming challenge in terms of wanting to judge the accomplishments of that entire era.

Various people in the film, including Carrie Wood, expressed the idea that the 98 home run race saved baseball after the strike. And that's not a new idea. Many people have said that. And it makes a good story, of course. But if you look at the attendance figures, both before and after 98, I don't think it stands up to scrutiny, really. I guess you could disagree. And I wonder whether you subscribe to that idea, that it really did save baseball, or if baseball was on its way back already and whether you considered kind of pushing back on that a bit? To me, what it did was, I think in that moment, and maybe it was the moment of, you know, in Busch Stadium, Mark and Sammy embracing after Mark hit 62. I think for a lot of people in the country, both baseball fans and people

who didn't follow the game closely, it was a moment that made them feel like baseball was representing the best of America. That what they thought, like, this is what America could be to have these two guys doing this thing, embracing one another, embracing the history of the game. I think it helped to change people's perceptions about how they felt about baseball after they may have felt more bitterly after the strike. So I don't just look at it in terms of the attendance numbers or even the viewership numbers, which you can look at different statistics and it goes different ways. To me, it's more about a sort of a less tangible, numerically a feeling that people had around this sport that they hadn't had

since the strike and, you know, but which has lingered, had lingered for a while, I think, in terms of people's perception of baseball. The year after they hit 70 and 66 home runs, they both topped 60 again. And then a couple of years later, when Bonds hit 73, Sosa hit 64, I think, again. And so much of what this documentary covers, I had forgotten about. I was just a college kid at the time, kind of watching it, but a lot of it was really new to me. And so I actually cannot remember whether there was a home run chase in 1999, whether we all freaked out because they were both chasing 70 again. And you spent a lot of time in that era. What was it like

in 1999? Was it still a big deal or did we move on and did it get just too familiar? No, I mean, I think if you look at attendance figures or viewership, when Cardinals and Cubs were coming to town, you were still seeing these crowds and still seeing these people who were showing up, you know, hours in advance for batting practice. I mean, I certainly remember in advance for batting practice. I mean, I certainly remember going to Dodger Stadium in 99. You went down to see the Padres play the Cardinals,

and people were showing up en masse to attend batting practice to see McGuire hit. So I think there was still a level of enthusiasm. I don't know if people felt that, you know, hey, they're going to do it again. I think it was more just like, oh, you know, maybe we're going to see some more home runs from these guys that we've fallen in love with. And I want to ask one other question about what the coverage was like or what the public sentiment was like, because you spent so much time in that space. Like, I have a sort of a vague memory. And I mean, the documentary captures this, that Sammy Sosa was in a lot of ways treated as like a secondary character in this drama, a very crucial one.

But because he wasn't as famous before the season began, because he was trailing most of the time, because he kind of came out late, because, you know, probably because Mark McGuire was American. Because Mark McGuire was American and the home run title has often been sort of a, I don't know how to put it, but a little bit of a fraught identity record. I guess the question that I have is, were people rooting against Sammy Sosa? I don't really remember which way that it went. Was there a sense that like Mark McGuire was the public choice? I think it depends on who you talk to. I think a lot of people around the Cardinals felt that people were rooting for Sosa because he was the underdog and he was having so much fun. Whereas for most of the season, you know, Mark was, you know, did not want people's attention on whether or not he had hit a home run. You know, Sammy was like, yep, you want to

interview me? Bring the cameras, like, let's go. And so I think it depends on who you talk to. It may change as to who people felt was, you know, the favorite. I think, certainly from a perspective of a game that, you know, had seen Hank Aaron treated extraordinarily poorly when he was challenging the all-time home run record. There were a lot of people who were patting themselves on the back just to see that there wasn't that kind of vitriol aimed toward Sammy and that this felt like a feel-good moment in race relations. You know, there's a somewhat infamous cartoon of there's a wall in front of them that they've broken down that said racism. And, you know, that was a bit naive.

I think we can all agree, as being these both likable and admirable characters. And I don't think that, aside from your individual fandom of a certain team, I don't think there would have been disappointment about either one of them ultimately ending the season with the record. I think if Sosa would have done that after McGuire hit 62, it certainly would have been a very interesting twist on the storyline. You interviewed Todd McFarlane, who paid roughly $3 million for McGuire's 70th home run ball and also paid a much smaller amount for Sosa's 66th. And McFarlane also later bought Barry Bonds' 73rd home run ball, although that only cost him half a million, which makes me think that maybe the 70th home run ball didn't really appreciate. So I wonder whether you asked him whether he regrets spending that much on those balls, whether they're still special to him and whether they're still worth a fraction of what he paid for them. worth a fraction of what he paid for them? Well, he said that there were a couple of reasons why he did it. One of the reasons was that he, you know, had really wanted to get into doing action figurines of sports players. And he had had a hard time having anyone in the league sort

of take him seriously as somebody who would do that. He thought, if I do this, it will show that I'm serious about sports and I'll be able to try to get that to happen. And his guess was right. I mean, he did end up getting those contracts. And I'm sure that he has, in fact, I know that he has made that money back in terms of being able to do those sports figures. He said the secondary reason why he did it was because his brothers were both huge baseball fans. And to quote him, he wanted to be able to say to them, I've got the baseball, I've got the baseball. So for those two reasons, despite the fact that I think cumulatively

he paid over like $5 million for the baseball collection from 98. He still feels good about it. One last question about the music, which is by Jeff Tweedy, and which is really beautiful and astounding. I was gonna ask about that, too. It's almost distracting, because I like it so much. I'm like, wait, pause the documentaries. I want to hear the rest of the song. Yeah, it's so good. And I mean, so much of this'm like, wait, pause the documentaries. I want to hear the rest of this song. Yeah, it's so good. And I mean, so much of this documentary is just, you're just watching these beautiful things and listening to these beautiful things.

And so that's like, it's really pleasant. And I wanted to know with, because we've had some conversations about what constitutes a baseball song. Did you tell Jeff, make it baseball-y? And did he, like, do you feel like it is baseball-y? And what about it says this is baseball documentary music? Well, you know, Jeff grew, I grew up just outside St. Louis, a small town, Edwardsville, Illinois. Jeff grew up in Belleville, which is like about two to three towns south of where I grew up. And he's a little bit older than me. I knew he was a baseball fan. And of course, now, you know, he lives in Chicago. So when I started talking with ESPN,

I was like, you know, I would really love to get Jeff Tweedy to do the soundtrack. Did not know whether that was possible. I don't know, did not know Jeff personally at the time. So we reached out, you know, I had a conversation about it. And, you know, I said, you know, what I'm just interested in is that, you know, kind of where I'm coming from in terms of being a baseball fan who grew up in St. Louis during the era that I did. And I talked about Jack Buck and Mike Shannon on the radio and, you know, driving around with my dad in the station wagon, you know, through the cornfields, listening to the games. So I just kind of talked to him sort of thematically about the background of how I was looking at structuring the film. And on my birthday last year, I woke up and opened my email and there were 20 tracks from him.

And so he just sent me all this music. You know, one of the things that I'm so excited about the film is the way I was able to cut to his music from like Home Runs 55 through the 62 sequence. I used a lot of his bass stems and then went to Chicago in early March before the pandemic hit. And, you know, he added some flourishes to kind of go with the picture. But the idea of having, you know, these voices who had witnessed it, you know, people who had touched the events in Busch Stadium in September of 98, and combine that with some of this film footage, you know, MLB had sent out film camera persons, 16 and 35, and some of that has been seen, but most of it hasn't. And then Jeff's score and just kind of put all this together and try to make these emotions that were felt at the time. You know, when Mark goes and hugs the Maris family, when he lifts the sun up into the air, you know, the generational aspect of baseball that seemed to be so dominant in that

moment. You know, Jeff's music was just a joy to get to edit with because it really felt like you could underline things in a way that, you know, you maybe wouldn't be able to. And, you know, when I first heard it, I didn't think like, oh, this sounds like Americana baseball music. But I think that it's perfect. There's a sort of, you know, atonality to some of it that just on its own doesn't seem like it would work, but it totally does. Can we download or stream that somewhere? Or can you just forward the email from Jeff Tweedy so I personally can? Yeah, we should talk to Jeff about that. I mean, I'm just thrilled that people get to hear it because I think, you know, it's some of the best score music for a documentary that I've ever heard. So I'm excited for people to hear it on Sunday.

All right. Well, congrats again. And thanks for coming on. Appreciate it. Thanks very much. I appreciate it as well. All right. So we will take a quick break now and then Sam and I will be back for some additional discussion. All right, so we just wanted to do a little post-interview discussion,

just me and you now, about what we thought about the movie or what we thought about when we were watching the movie. And I was very much in the target market for this movie, I think, just because of how old I was when all of this happened. So this was summer of 98. I guess I was 11 years old. And people say that age 12 or whatever is when you tend to care most about baseball. And I don't know if that's true for me or for everyone, but I certainly did care deeply about baseball at that time. And my own fandom was kind of at a height because I was a Yankees fan and I was watching one of the best teams ever.

And meanwhile, this home run chase was playing out. And I remember tuning into it whenever I could and wherever I was. And I took some trips that summer, I recall. And it was constantly like, how do I find out what McGuire and Sosa did today? Because you couldn't do that on your phone. It wasn't just omnipresent the way it would be today. So it was like, got to get in front of a TV, got to get to a sports center, got to watch this game if it's being broadcast. And it really took me back to that time, especially when the graphics on the screen in the documentary would show the leaderboard, that just brought back really visceral memories for me

because that was what you saw all of that summer. It was those three guys or then those two guys just jockeying for position at the top. Yeah, the feeling that, I mean, I agree. We mentioned this in the interview, but the decision really for the documentary was, is this going to be a documentary about reliving that summer? Or is it going to be a documentary about reframing that summer? And if I were starting the project, my natural temperament would probably make me think, ah, this is a reframe it type of story. And he chose the relive it one.

And it's just a choice. There's not a right way. It just depends on what you, which story you want to tell, how you want to tell it. But I definitely was caught up in reliving it. Like I, I did not know that I needed to relive it. I, that summer, like I thought that I remembered it, but really like to, to get caught up in it again, to see the swings, to feel like the pressure building. It was really, I thought, effectively done. I mean, the sense of time and place was really captured very well.

And at the end of it, though, at the end of this experience, I think mirrors the end of the experience of actual 1998, which is that you're really, when you're in the middle of a record chase or even thinking about a hypothetical record chase, it seems just so hard to break the record. I mean, it's never been done, right? 62 has never been done. And it seems like it's going to be this momentous, impossible, incredible thing. And when you describe the idea of somebody hitting 62 home

runs, it just sounds Titanic and gargantuan. And the kind of the conclusion at the end of 1998 was, as I think a lot of records are where you actually see it happen and you go, oh yeah, that just, that, that just was a thing. Like it wasn't impossible. It was very possible. They didn't just hit 62. hit 70 yeah and it wasn't just one of them it was two of them and then they didn't just do it once they both did it the next year and there was something about like living with the anticipation of seeing 62 that gets stripped away immediately upon 62 actually being hit and trounced and demolished. And recapturing the anticipation and the feeling that we had in August that this was a thing that mattered,

as opposed to the feeling we had in the years to follow, where it looked smaller and smaller with every passing year, was like an amazing moment to capture and you could really get you made that transition in a way in the middle of the documentary anew you sort of felt like when he makes the decision okay now we're going to talk about the steroids now we're going to show bonds hitting number 71 you feel that same sort of like almost loss of tension. was fixed on the milestones like 60, 61, 62. And even though it was pretty apparent that they were going to break that at a certain point or that they would even blow by it because there was a lot of season left and they were right there, still, once he got to 62, that sort of felt like, okay, that's it. Maybe because Maris, when he broke Ruth's record, it was just by one. He just

barely got by and it took a longer season. And then this time they just, they got to 62 and they just kept going and going. And the numbers as they kept climbing up into the upper 60s and then 70s, it was like mind boggling even to see that again, because I've just been thinking about it as, yeah, if McGuire hit 70, Bonds hit 73, no big deal. I've sort of gotten used to that idea. But to see it happen in the moment where 62 was so amazing, and then they didn't stop there. They kept going and going. And these numbers kept climbing into this just unimaginable level. But then, as you said, they did it again. So it wasn't a one-time thing. But that was really remarkable at the moment. So just so different from roger maris

where like you say he did it by one home run by the skin of his teeth in a controversial way even like it was so close that some people wouldn't count it even and and he never came close again i mean roger maris made it look hard. And the experience of watching Sosa and McGuire from 98 to 2001 was they made it look really, really easy. And in a sense, that shows just how great they were and how for those four or five years, they were both just they had just mastered the art of hitting home runs. But in a sense, it also just sort of captures that this was a story about an era as much as anything else. And that, I don't know, it just felt like they had, like it just, it didn't feel, it was stressful.

It looked stressful. It didn't look hard though. Like there were a lot of bad swings that you'd watch like a bad swing and then like, oh, well, that's number 48. Right. Yeah. And that's something I don't know if it's really a critique of the documentary, but it's something that I guess I wish had been mentioned in some way is that clearly this was a product of the offensive environment. I think there's a good probability that the ball caused a lot of that. I think there's a good probability that the ball caused a lot of that.

So this was something that in my interview with AJ I talked about, and I think I had written something about it for The Ringer, and that was even why he brought me on. And it didn't end up in the documentary, and I'm not shocked because maybe it's kind of complicated. And as he said, there was limited time to get to that. But if you experience this in the moment or for many people watching this now, they think, oh, well, guys were hitting a lot of homers because steroids. And that's really the only explanation given for why they were hitting so many homers. And if anything, that kind of cheapens the accomplishment if you think that's all it was. On the other hand, maybe it makes it more impressive because really the reality is that this was an incredibly high scoring era. It was the highest home run rate era until the current one. But the fact that we're now seeing this era with strict drug testing and yet the home run rate is higher than it was then. And

granted, the distribution is different and the leaders are not hitting as many home runs. There aren't the outliers that there were. And I'm not saying that steroids didn't play a part in those home run totals, but I would have liked a little more context to just say, hey, the home run rate really skyrocketed suddenly. And it seems like it's the ball. A lot of people think, well, maybe it's expansion, maybe it's smaller ballparks. And I've seen some studies on that that suggest it probably wasn't that. But the way that the home run rate just leaped up all of a sudden, I think it's pretty consistent with the ball being part of it. And even if you look at McGuire's whole career, like when he came up in 87 and he set the rookie home run record, well, that too

was a really outlier home run rate year. And then the home run rate went down again and McGuire's home run totals went down again. And it's not really a coincidence. Like when records are set, often it is when there's some underlying issue here. And maybe it wasn't necessary to get into that, but that has kind of reframed my own understanding of that era and what was responsible for these high home run totals. So I am interested in sort of raising awareness of that as a factor. Yeah. I'm looking at Mark mcguire's baseball reference page right now and seeing the number 70 of course is like wow that's a lot of home runs yeah it's a lot of home runs right like that yeah that's a line that you notice but i'm almost more amazed at

2000 when he hit 32 home runs in 236 at bats to me 32 and 236 is even weirder more discordant more out of uh out of place on a baseball reference page than 70 and 509 hey what do you think this documentary would have been like or or what do you think i guess maybe broader conversation about mart mcguire and sammy sosa would be like if barry bonds had never hit, had hit 53 home runs in 2001. Yeah, I don't know because it doesn't really change anything about what it was like at that time. And so much of the story is that it captivated the whole country in a way that maybe we haven't seen since. And that happened regardless of the fact that Bonds came along a few years later and broke the record. I did think it was amusing to hear one of the calls.

I guess it was the call on the 70th Homer where the announcer says, they'll be shooting at that one for years and years. And I don't know, it's three years, years and years, technically, I guess. It's more than two years, but they were not shooting at that one for very long. But I don't know that it actually changes it that much because A, no one really accepts Bonds' record as legitimate. And these days, no one really accepts Maguire's record as legitimate. And I don't mean legitimate as in they don't count. They do count. The stats happen. They're in the record book. But people don't consider them to have been on the level or on the up and up because of what we know now. And so I don't know that it actually matters that much because even if Maguire were still the record holder, I'm not sure people would really give him the respect

that a typical clean or perceived to be clean record holder gets. Yeah, I don't know either. Yeah, I don't know either. I guess hypothetically, feel like like one of the lessons that of of seeing how players are singled out for their their ped usage when they get too good that if you can be really good because of peds but you can't be too good because once you get too good then then people don't forgive you for it, is that you kind of, you sort of don't want to have too high a profile.

I think, I don't know, totally spitballing, you know, I don't know if this is true at all, but you could maybe imagine that the sport was more willing to forgive Mark McGuire because he didn't have the home run record than maybe they would if he still had the home run record. Yeah. because he didn't have the home run record than maybe they would if he still had the home run record. Yeah, I do think part of it is that they did too well and they brought this upon themselves because people are upset about the fact that you can't compare the stats across eras because steroids skew things. But I think part of it is also how they have handled the post-Revelations comments and their lack of contrition or their kind of qualified contrition. So you had McGuire, of course, clamming up at the congressional hearing several years later with his much derided line,

I'm not here to talk about the past, which was sort of exactly what he was supposed to be there for. supposed to be there for. And even now, how he always says that it was an injury recovery thing, which first of all, even if it was an injury recovery thing, that's still essentially a performance enhancer. I mean, if you think that you would have been hurt otherwise, then you wouldn't have even been on the field or it would have been impacting your performance in some way. So even if you're just telling yourself, well, I've always been great at hitting homers, which is true in Maguire's case, and this didn't make me better at hitting homers, it just enabled me to stay on the field, that's still pretty significant. That's not nothing. And I think most people don't really believe that that was the sole effect either. they had come out at some point as some other players from that era have done and really just threw themselves on the mercy of the court of public opinion and said yes I did this and here's why and I'm sorry I think things might be a little different like McGuire just doesn't totally seem fully ready to reckon with it and it seems like to the extent that he has it was probably because

he wanted to work in baseball again and that was kind of the cost that he had to apologize if he was going to be embraced again. And Sosa has not apologized and has not really been embraced by the Cubs, which is sort of a shame regardless of what he did or didn't do. I think people would probably still be pretty pleased to see him just the way that Giants fans are always pleased to see Barry Bonds. Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a shame. It's always a shame when our judgment, when the collective judgment is applied inconsistently. And this is because, I mean, partly because this all happened in an era where, you know, like guilt has always been a little squishy because we don't really know who did it, why, and as part of what kind of social norms in the game.

But also because we have, instead of having, because there is no retroactive punishment, we have, I mean, collectively, the sport has decided that this is going to be handled by how large groups of people collectively treat athletes in retrospect. And it's just, it's, it's inconsistent. It like it has always been inconsistent. And I mean, I think that that's a shame in all sorts of ways. I think that it would be nice if we had a way to close the books on this era that didn't involve some players feeling really targeted. And some players, you know, not like, like, it just it's, it's one line on their Wikipedia page and nothing more. So yeah, I mean, it is bizarre that you can have a player

who is one of the most significant players in the last 50 years of a franchise who's basically kept out of the franchise in Sosa, whereas you have other players who are employed by major league teams right now and just doing fine like Mark McGcguire this is not a big issue but i will just uh since you mentioned it i'll say that the uh that the not it's it's not a convincing uh when when mark mcguire says that he just needed it to stay on the field and

it was just about recovery i don't really believe that that's the only effect of PEDs. But if it were true, if you believe the facts of that, I actually think that it would be a very different thing. Like I we we accept all sorts of of controlled substances being used for therapeutic reasons. And I don't think people are like upset. I don't think people would be upset if these these chemicals were used to keep players on the field. Just like they're not upset that cortisone is used to keep players on the field. It's specifically the performance enhancing aspect of it. It's the idea that the home run was not real. People want to see baseball players or people want to see great performers in any field given the chance to perform their skill.

It's really the feeling that that home run that I saw wasn't real. And McGuire and others have always been caught in between where there isn't a way that they're comfortable admitting that fact. And if they're not comfortable admitting that fact, that it did cause them to hit more home runs, then there's something that feels like you lose the apology right away like from the very first words of your apology there is something that the listener is just doesn't find that to be authentic convincing based on his own premise and so it's it's kind of really a little bit sad to see just 20 years later,

McGuire still sort of fumbling to try to figure out a way to communicate with the public of what he did, why he did it, and what it meant to him as a performer. And I don't know, I guess that maybe at the core of both his experience and Sosa's experience is just that amazingly, 22 years later, there still isn't any really sort of openness that we can all collectively have. There's a, it's a lot of fragmentary conversations about an era that we still don't

understand all that well. And it would, it would be nice at least for, for me as a baseball fan, if, if we, we all were a little bit like, i don't know if we all felt a little safer uh having a conversation about you know what what it all meant but it's just that

when you're when you're a an elite athlete and you're playing for your legacy and you can't trust necessarily a good faith interpretation of of your actions you're just you're still cautious 20 years later yeah and i still feel like i'm so much of the documentary is capturing the stress the pressure that both those players felt although it really feels like maybe the pressure was on both of them but mart mcguire is the one who really yeah had trouble with it right so it seems to have thrived he did it really seems to have been like uh it's to to suited his his personality and uh he saw it as a gift it was it was really it's sort of a lot more joyful to watch sammy sosa because oh yeah the summer he embraced the summer as a blessing and mark mcguire pushed the summer away in a lot of ways.

Yeah, there's even a point where McGuire says something like, there were no rules, there were no regulations, which is not actually true. If he was talking about Andrew specifically, okay, but there were rules, there were regulations, like the things that he was taking, he was taking steroids, he said for like a-year period. And that was banned by baseball, and it was illegal in the country at the time. And I know that wasn't really enforced, and there was a culture of permissiveness and looking the other way. But it's not actually true that he was not breaking rules or regulations. So that just seems like part of his rationalizing of this, which like clearly the accomplishment seems to mean a lot to him. And I can see why he wouldn't want to diminish it by saying, yeah, I was juicing and that's why I hit these homers. And I also understand why if you're Mark McGuire, you probably think that you could just hit dingers at will because he always did.

Right. There was this story about how many homers he hit in Little League. And then he comes up as a rookie with the A's and he's mashing dingers left and right so like clearly he was a home run hitter and he was a great slugger and that would have been true even if he hadn't taken what he took so it's probably pretty easy if you're mark mcguire to tell yourself that even if we don't really buy it watching from afar. Yeah. Well, I mean, look, nobody wants to hear the player who cheated to win say, ah, but I mean, it didn't really help. I mean, whether it's true or not, and whether even you care that much. I mean, I don't, I'm a, as a non-baseball player, I am not personally that,

I don't know. I, I, I accept that, that there's a certain amount of cheating in the game that, that the players themselves, you know, are, are negotiating amongst themselves. And so I try not to, to be too judgmental about it. It's, it's part of their game and I'm an observer and I am a grateful consumer of the game. Uh, but you know, it's their game. Right. And so I try not to get too upset about it or to like, you know, get too judgmental about it. But even for me, like it's like, I, I like truth, you know, I like a certain amount of like authenticity. I like it when a person looks me in the eye and tells me the truth. And there is a feeling that when someone says that, you know, yeah, I used I secretly use steroids to win a home run record, but it didn't help me that it's not the record that I'm protective of.

It's just like my own dignity. Like, I don't really believe that when you say it to me. And that's more my response than anything else. I think, you know, I don't stay up nights thinking about how Mark McGuire misled me. I understand that there was a lot of, you know, self-interested reasoning going on and Mark McGuire quite possibly believes it. And Mark McGuire might actually be 100% true. It is conceivable that he didn't get any home runs. But, you know, I don't, like, I just am not persuaded by it. Yeah. But public figure, you know, looking at a camera and telling me something that doesn't really pass the smell test,

it's just something that I broadly react negatively to in my life. And so I think that's one of the reasons that it's been hard to really embrace the player, you know, Maguire's own spin on what happened that summer. Yeah. And even though I knew the broad strokes of the story, and I obviously knew the totals and where they ended up, I had forgotten some of the specifics and the details. As you said, you remembered some things that you had forgotten. Like, I forgot that Sosa took the lead in this race with 66 on September 25th. I forgot that it was in doubt that late. I forgot

or never knew that McGuire wanted to take the last day of the season off because he was so exhausted, and then he hit two more homers that day, so he could easily have ended up with 68, and then he hit 70 in his last at-bat. Didn't really know that, wasn't aware of that. And this made me kind of dive back into baseball reference and look up some stuff. I'm almost surprised that Sosa won the MVP award. I mean, it's purely because the Cubs made the playoffs and the Cardinals didn't, I assume, because McGuire had a better season. I mean, he had a higher war and he was way better offensively. That was like an all-time great offensive season for mcguire whereas sosa season was great but it was very much the homers whereas mcguire the ribbies

yeah yeah that too i guess you know i don't know whether that would be the case now and and looking back at like the war leaders from that season and seeing that barry bonds had a higher war than either of them you know before he was doing whatever he was doing, as far as we know, that was sort of striking too. Because Bonds is not in the documentary, I think. Well, there's one quick clip where he's going back to the fence on a Sosa Homer, I think, and there just isn't a whole lot of him otherwise. And so you can kind of understand, even now when we're retelling the story of that summer, he's not really a part of it, even though he had a better season in a lot of ways

and value-wise than both of those guys did. And so you can see why he may have felt overlooked or aggrieved about that, which perhaps explains why he did what he did but he was so good and that was the summer when he was walked with the bases loaded too intentionally also so that was like his reputation at that time even though he was not really in the spotlight yeah tim kuhn wrote about the home run chase and about this documentary for espn And he actually noted another appearance of Bonds, which I'll read.

Tim writes, the most memorable moment in Long Gone Summer is so subtle, it can't be accidental. It's when I think there's maybe a montage of McGuire home runs and in the middle of one of the McGuire home runs, it cuts to, well, but as he's rounding the bases

on this particular home run against this particular team, we get a glimpse of this particular brand of salvation created by the summer of 98. The camera shows Barry Bonds standing in the outfield. It lasts barely a second. This is the thin, fast, mustachioed Barry Bonds, the guy who was the most complete player in baseball for the entire decade of the 90s. And he's standing out there with his arms folded. The look on his face is both disgusted and satisfied.

He's the detective who just bore through the lies to solve a gruesome crime. And you can sort of see in that shot the foreshadowing of Bonds, at least according to the public telling of it, the lore that he reacted to this home run chase by just saying, you know, if that's how we're going to do it,

I'm going to be the best at that game too. The most extraordinary aspect of the summer, as the documentary tells it, I think, is that Sammy Sosa was, he was trailing most of the time and he was so non-competitive with Mark McGuire about that fact. It really is just, he had a generousness to the race that I don't think we normally expect from our athletes. We almost expect our athletes to be sociopathically competitive, self-interested, non-generous. And Sosa is really, truly very generous.

And so much of what I remember about that race was that the two of them were doing it together, that they seemed to be supporting each other. And watching the documentary, you see that the energy for that narrative is mostly coming from sosa sosa is the one who's really is giving the gregarious answers when they're being interviewed together who jogs in to the consternation of his teammates to congratulate mart mcguire and you know there's that moment when he catches McGuire in the final week of the season and McGuire like sort of snaps alert and is like, wait, he caught me. I can't lose this.

And he, he has a, he does not have a sense of, of, of perspective that like we're collectively doing, we're together doing something historically. Mark McGuire is trying to get the all time home run record. That's what he's there for and sosa is pushing him because you know mcguire doesn't want to lose to sosa i assume sosa also didn't want to lose mcguire and i mean he also says like you know he wanted the record he was trying to to be the man but he alone seems to have recognized that what they were doing collectively was a shared thing that was bigger than it would be if just one of them were doing it and that was going to lift both of them together it wasn't zero sun it wasn't only one person is going to be only one person is going

to win the race but it's not that there's only going to be one winner yeah and i think that's a part of the reason that he didn't feel i guess maybe didn't exhibit the same sense of of you know being weighed down by the pressure because he and mcguire in in the story that that he was living he and mcguire were having fun together and bopping a lot of dingers and in the story that mcguuire was telling, it was like he had to do this thing and he was all alone and he needed to be the champ and he was beset by pressure. Yeah, and I wonder if that has to do with the trajectory that they took and how they got there because Maguire was the first-round draft pick

and he was the all-time rookie home run leader and then in 96 he led the majors in home runs and then 97 he had 58 and so there was a lot of pressure coming into it and he was such a huge star and he'd been an all-star over and over and Sosa to that point in his career had been an all-star once he never hit more than 40 home runs and so no one was really expecting him to do this and Maguire even says in the documentary that he just like basically didn't know who Sammy Sosa was before like July of that summer, which, you know, I think that Sosa maybe doesn't get enough credit for his improvements as

a player because people look at his home run totals and they say, okay, 20 something, 30 something, you know, 40 once, and then all of a sudden 66, 63, 64, and people just look at him as a steroid mirage. I think he did really make some changes and make himself better. Matt Trueblood wrote an article about that for BP recently where he looked at how Sosa became a more well-rounded hitter and improved his plate discipline and started going the other way and that sort of thing. So I think he did really make improvements, genuine improvements, but maybe because he wasn't starting from the point of everyone expecting him to make a run at this record from day one. I don't want to say he looked at it as, well, whatever I do is gravy, but,

you know, no one was putting pressure on him to be the one to do this. So the fact that he got so close, maybe he was just able to enjoy that, whereas Maguire was kind of anointed as the person who was supposed to do it. I also think the physiques, that was something like, particularly Maguire's. Oh my goodness, yeah. It's unbelievable. It really is, yeah. When I was a kid, there was an urban legend when I was a kid that Arnold Schwarzenegger had

to use a two foot fork because he couldn't bring his, he couldn't bring his elbow in enough to get a normal fork to his mouth. And I'm assuming that that story is not true. Uh, and, and eight year olds have weird ideas about how the world works. But yeah, when Maguire would jog around the bases, it was like watching Legos move. Yeah, he's just like stuffed into that uniform. And the thing is, I think because of Maguire, maybe we expect that, oh, well, that's what steroids do. And so if you take steroids, you're going to look like a bodybuilder. And most baseball players, even the ones we know have taken steroids, do not look like that. So I don't know if that's just accentuating what was already his physique or the way he worked out or

what he was taking or what, but it's really striking. And I think that's maybe part of why he is perceived as the face of this or why it's harder to get past it with him because he just looks so cartoonishly huge and the giant Popeye forearms and the broad back and just like the tight pants with his just like massive lower body. It's just like the earth is shaking as he moves around. And the funny thing is that he still looks pretty huge. Like Bonds these days has slimmed down, right? And he's like, you know, he does a ton of cardio and he's a serious bike rider and he's much slimmer than he was back then. Whereas McGuire in the interviews here, he still looks pretty gigantic. Like his arms are still huge. So I don't know if that's just the way he is built or he's

still working out pretty hard or what, but I do think that is part of the perception of it. Just the way he looked in a uniform was different from really anyone else. Anyway, I am glad this exists. I enjoyed it. I didn't really expect to enjoy it, or at least I wasn't wanting this. I wasn't thinking, you know what, we need a documentary about the 98 home run race. In fact, I remember in 2018, one of our editors at The Ringer kind of sounded us out about doing an oral history of the 98 home run race, which I don't know, maybe other people ended up doing. And there just was not a lot of enthusiasm. And I personally wasn't that interested in doing it, partly because I felt like, well, McGuire and Sosa aren't going to talk to me for this, and that probably would have been true.

But also just because I don't really want to dwell on the steroid stuff even more than we have dwelled on the steroid stuff, and it does color your perception of the whole thing, so you can't just celebrate it wholeheartedly anymore you have to talk about the steroid stuff and that topic tends to be sort of tiresome for me so i wouldn't have wanted to make this documentary but i was sort of surprised by how much i enjoyed it even just seeing the footage feeling the atmosphere again like you know seeing stewart scott do sports center and talk about this or even just like you know, seeing Stuart Scott do SportsCenter and talk about this, or even just like, you know, I don't want to make it sound like AJ's job was easy, but really, if you had just shown me a montage of every McGuire and Sosa home run from that year, I would have enjoyed that a lot too, just like seeing these gigantic blasts and their swings

and everything. I just would have enjoyed that footage. So I did enjoy the trip back. And I think even though I object to the idea that this saved baseball and, you know, the attendance recoveries were much bigger in 96 and 97. And in 98, there wasn't that big a boost. In 99, it was basically flat. And after that attendance actually dropped so i don't really buy that narrative but even so i think in that time it really was all consuming and i think the documentary did a good job of showing that like whether it was you know espn breaking in to show live batting practice which is just inconceivable now or it it's the clip of Bob Lee comparing it to the Miracle on Ice, or even that footage of the kids in a classroom and the teacher saying,

hey, how many people are going to watch the McGuire game tonight or McGuire-Sosa when he was going for 62, and every single hand went up. And it's pretty hard to imagine anything in baseball provoking that reaction today. So even if the lasting impact wasn't as great as some people make it out to be, in the moment, it really was the dominant sports story and so much fun to follow. And I don't know that baseball has had a story like that again. And I don't know that it could in this sort of regional era where it's not often national news. I believe you would have done that oral history if Jeff Tweedy had agreed to score it for you. Yeah, okay. That's probably true. All right, so go check out Long Gone Summer if you missed it on the first airing. And thanks again to AJ for coming on. That will do it for today. Thanks for listening.

You can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some small amount to help keep the podcast going and get themselves access to some perks. Adam Bechea, Zach Busser, Sal Cacciatore, Michael Armstrong, and Randy Sabia. Thanks to all of you. You can join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and other podcast platforms. And you can contact me and Sam and Meg via email at podcast at fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. Thanks to Dylan Higgins for his editing assistance.

And we expect to be back to a regular schedule this week, so we will talk to you soon. Do you think they'll ever have a show down in Branson? Talk about desire, social, and McGuire. And is we in the fry pan or is we in the fire? Talk about what's real and what you really feel. And how's about those mini skirts on the alley in the building? Talk about the X-Files, macaroons, and mistrots. Did you ever snag your jacket pocket on a turnstile? Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.