The truth was that baseball had been somewhat confounded by steroids. The conventional wisdom had long suggested that bulk did not help in baseball, and the entirety of baseball’s leadership had been taken by surprise by the speed with which steroids had taken on a prominent role in their sport. Now the secret had gotten out at the worst possible time. Still, in the short term, baseball looked to be the winner. The McGwire-Sosa home run chase had continued with only a minor interruption, and the celebration of Bud Selig’s renaissance went on undiminished. Yet to John Hoberman, the league had made a terrible mistake that would hurt them over the long term. By dealing with the McGwire issue so passively, baseball’s leadership had sent the tacit message to its players that it was not going to be proactive about the sophisticated drugs that were clearly changing the game. Thus it was only a matter of time, Hoberman thought, before baseball would pay for its inaction with an even bigger scandal. For the time being, however, baseball seemed content that it had made the andro crisis go away.
IN 1999, Nike, the sneaker giant whose creative commercials turned sports stars into pop culture icons, dreamed up an ad that became the envy of the advertising community. The spot featured two of the best pitchers of the decade, Atlanta’s Tom Glavine and Greg Maddux, taking batting practice and trying to catch the eye of Melrose Place star Heather Locklear, only to be rebuffed in favor of the home run-hitting McGwire. Their lament, “chicks dig the long ball,” became a catch phrase that transcended baseball and exploded its appeal. The sport that could never properly market itself had finally found a marketable star: the home run.
Scott Grayson, the New York ad executive who had such difficulty trying to entice baseball executives into being a bit less button-down following the strike, loved it. Grayson thought baseball not only had arrived, but had finally recognized how to connect with the younger audience that had always eluded it. Though the spot belonged to Nike, it spoke for the baseball environment unlike any other. “It was brilliant,” Grayson said. “I wish I’d thought of it.” It was also was emblematic of baseball’s home run culture.
The previous year, the elite status of 50 home runs had vanished in an eyeblink as it was reached by four players—McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Ken Griffey, and Greg Vaughn. Meanwhile, McGwire and Sosa had surpased Roger Maris’s single-season record, which had stood for thirty-seven years, by a combined 14 home runs. In 1999, they picked up right where they left off. On July 26, McGwire hit his 31st home run of the season. He was behind his record pace, but still seemed in a good position to challenge his own mark. Two days earlier, Sosa had hit his 36th, a long solo shot off the Mets’ Octavio Dotel at Shea Stadium. To the glee of owners everywhere, the two were performing an encore of their historic chase of the previous year.
On the night of August 5 at Busch Stadium, McGwire crushed his 500th home run, a shot to center field off the Padres’ Andy Ashby. If Sosa was now a star, McGwire had become a legend. No player in the history of the game—not Ruth, not Mays, not Ted Williams—had reached 500 homers faster. Later that night, he hit number 501. McGwire was being positioned as the new Ruth. No one in the game hit home runs farther or more often. In 1998, he hit a home run once every 7.3 at-bats. Not even Ruth had homered with that kind of frequency. For someone who shunned attention and who a few short years earlier believed his career to be in severe danger, Mark McGwire was now being discussed in historical terms. He was thirty-five years old, had hit more homers over the previous three years than anyone in the game ever had in a similar period, and looked more powerful than ever. Now, when McGwire was discussed it was with regard to passing Willie Mays’s career mark of 660 home runs. It was about catching Ruth at 714 and breaking Hank Aaron’s record 755. Both he and Sosa would top Maris for the second consecutive year and, as in 1998, McGwire would win the home run crown, 65 homers to Sosa’s 63. In two seasons, McGwire had hit 135 homers, Sosa 129.
The totals were staggering, but consecutive seasons of rewriting the home run record book would have a profound impact on both men. For McGwire, 65 home runs should have been a feat worthy of celebration, but Mark McGwire felt slightly hollow. Weeks after the 1998 season, McGwire allowed himself to reflect on what he had just accomplished, concluding, “This record will never be broken.” A year later, basking in the afterglow of a 65-homer season, McGwire did not feel quite so celebratory. He told intimates that maybe what he had done in 1998 wasn’t so remarkable, especially if just one year later he could come so close to duplicating the feat. Once in “awe” of himself, McGwire had become less enamored of his own brilliance. Maybe, he thought, 70 home runs could be broken after all.
Two years later, Barry Bonds proved McGwire prophetic, shattering his 70 home run mark with a mind-boggling 73. That same year, Mark McGwire’s baseball career came to a sudden end. It had been a dismal season. Overcome by injuries to his knees and his back, McGwire still managed to hit 29 home runs, but collected only 27 other hits. His average plummeted to .187. In 1999, McGwire had hit 65 homers. In 2000 and 2001 combined he hit just 61. The Cardinals made the playoffs, but McGwire, due to a deteriorating right knee, started only three games. Just three years earlier, he had dominated the sport, but now, in the fall of 2001, Mark McGwire couldn’t even stay on the field for the playoffs.
Things reached their nadir in the fifth and deciding game of the National League Division Series against Arizona. McGwire had struck out in each of his three at-bats against Diamondbacks starter Curt Schilling that night, and was now 1 for 11 in the playoffs, with six strikeouts. With the score tied in the top of the ninth and a man on first with no outs, Tony LaRussa chose to pinch hit for perhaps the most fearsome home run hitter of all time with the light-hitting Kerry Robinson, who was then ordered to bunt. It was the worst moment of McGwire’s career, and the last. In the bottom of the inning, the Diamondbacks rallied to win the game and the series. A month after the Cardinals were eliminated, McGwire announced he was quitting. Earlier in the season, he had agreed to a two-year, $30-million contract extension. McGwire did not accept the money. There would be no comeback, no cushy front office job or ubiquitous spot in a television broadcast booth for Mark McGwire. He quit baseball and then he disappeared.
The speed with which McGwire collapsed was met with sympathy by most, for here was a giant, the premier home run hitter of his time, who most likely would have challenged Aaron had he been able to remain healthy. To others, he was the ultimate metaphor for an era tainted by drugs. He had admitted to using creatine and androstenedione, which contained steroidal elements, and would always be hounded by questions of whether he had used anabolic steroids as well. In the medical community, doctors believed the use of andro enhanced anabolic steroids. They were also convinced that the type of injuries McGwire suffered were typical of a body affected by steroids, a by-product of overdevelopment, of joints weakened by anabolic substances, making his body far too powerful for his frame. McGwire grew so big his joints gave in.
Even his greatest accomplishment, his magical 70 home run season, would be clouded by the specter of drugs. Not only had he used andro, but the fact that Bonds had passed him a mere three years later took much of the glory from both men, focusing attention on the era rather than the accomplishments themselves. After his retirement, when steroid use would no longer be the closeted issue of McGwire’s time, some players were convinced that McGwire’s whiteness allowed him to avoid the type of scrutiny during his career that Bonds would later endure. “If you’re going to go after Barry,” one black American League player said, “you have to go after McGwire. The two go hand-in-hand. You can’t let one skate.”
IN 2001, Sammy Sosa entered the pantheon of great Chicago Cubs, the world of Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, Ron Santo, and Ryne Sandberg. For a Latino player, this was not insignificant. It was not commonplace, but there had been black players, such as Banks, who were synonymous with their teams. Jackie Robinson and Willie Mays were inseparable from the Dodgers and Giants. Kirby Puckett was the ultimate Twin. Hank Aaron
was the greatest of the Braves. Latinos were different. It wasn’t that Latino players were not recognized. The Giants’ Juan Marichal was considered one of the great pitchers of his era, but when fans thought San Francisco, they thought Mays and McCovey. Likewise, Luis Aparicio was a Hall of Fame shortstop for the White Sox and Orioles, but he could not compete in popularity with his teammates Nellie Fox and Brooks Robinson.
There was a sense among many Latino players that they could only be accepted in stereotypical terms, as jovial immigrant clowns, happy to be off the island. The seminal image came from a cutting Saturday Night Live skit in which Garrett Morris, playing a Latin baseball player, offered the eternal phrase, “Beisbol has been beddy, beddy good to me.” As with African American players, the Latino who did not cheerfully play his assigned part would often be cast as aloof, sullen, and distant. It was a trap from which only the Pirates great Roberto Clemente had managed to escape. To some of the more political Latino players, Sosa’s acceptance, while certainly the result of his energy and talent, was also due to the fact that he seemed willing to embody this stereotype. What made it worse was that during the magic of 1998, Sosa uttered Morris’s exact phrase during a press conference. To some, it lightened the mood. To others, it was Sosa working to be marketable at the expense of his dignity. Many Latino players seethed privately that Sammy Sosa had been cast, not inadvertently, as McGwire’s sidekick. To them, the entire home run chase would have been different if it were McGwire, the white star, chasing Sosa all year and not the other way around.
Still, Sosa had crossed important cultural territory. Especially in the minds of the younger fans, the Chicago Cubs were Sammy Sosa, and vice versa. Behind closed doors, however, Sosa clashed with his team just as he had in his early days with the White Sox. Inside the game, particularly inside the Cubs’ organization, a growing feeling existed that Sosa was a better player before his momentous home run barrage. Just three years before, Sosa had stolen 30 bases and hit 30 home runs. Many of the old hands in the Cubs organization recalled the shimmering necklace Sosa had purchased for himself and, while they weren’t thrilled with the audacity of his jewelry, wished for his overall game to return with the discipline he had learned.
By the end of the 1999 season, Sosa had become a legendary home run hitter, but the marvelous skills that had once made him a five-tool phenom had declined. He couldn’t field his position as he once had, with grace and athleticism, he no longer threw as well, and he could no longer effectively steal bases. There was a feeling inside the organization that he was too muscular, too obsessed with the home run. Intoxicated by his power surge, Sammy Sosa now had new goals. He now wanted to reach 600 homers. Maybe, he said, he would pass Aaron, just as McGwire seemed destined to do.
After falling from the wild card in 1998 to last place the following year, the Cubs fired Jim Riggleman and hired Don Baylor to manage the team. Baylor had played nearly twenty years in the big leagues and owned the painful distinction of having been hit with more pitches than any other man who began his career after 1890. Don Baylor was also a winner. From 1986 to 1988, he played in the World Series three straight years for three different teams, losing with Boston and Oakland but winning with Minnesota in 1987. Baylor had a plan for Sosa. He wanted Sosa to lose weight. He wanted Sosa, the team’s captain, to be less concerned with home runs and focus instead on employing an all-around style of winning baseball. Baylor wanted Sosa to run again. He wanted Sosa to be a force in right field again. He wanted Sosa to hit to the game situation, not just load up for the home run.
Sosa was enraged. It was he, along with McGwire, who had lifted the game to its wondrous heights. He felt slighted. He was the only player in baseball history to be chastised for hitting 60 home runs. To Don Baylor, Sosa’s response was an example of the press’s interfering and making a simple idea complicated. “It was how the media can take one thing that was said as constructive criticism and make it a national story. It really - wasn’t said that way. When we sat down it wasn’t a big deal. All I was trying to do was offer constructive criticism,” Baylor said. “Then a couple of reporters called down to the Dominican and told Sammy that I was taking him on. That wasn’t the case.”
Some baseball men believed the hard-boiled, old-school Baylor to be disbelieving of this new home run era and thought Sosa to be the epitome of it. For Baylor, however, it was more about bringing Sosa into line with the rest of the team, as he believed that anyone who managed a megastar could never win. “The manager is always under the scope with Sammy. The manager is always under the scope with Barry Bonds. That’s the way it is,” Baylor said.
The truth was that if the manager needed to find ways to tolerate and balance Sosa, his teammates had long grown tired of him. They were sick of the idea that the Sammy Sosa personality had overshadowed the team. Sosa controlled everything. In Oakland, the starting pitcher chose the music in the home clubhouse. With the Yankees, there was no music at all before home games. With the Cubs, Sosa chose the music. “It was either the five-hundredth variation of the same salsa tune or some Whitney Houston thing he used to play,” recalled Paul Sullivan, who covered the Cubs for the Chicago Tribune. “The guys had had enough of his act.” One American League scout who once collected information on Sosa for weeks knew Sosa had worn out his teammates. After 1998, he had used every advantage of stardom at their expense. He had an entourage that resembled a small battalion. Dignitaries such as Jesse Jackson found their way into the Cubs clubhouse and Sosa’s locker. He was bigger than the team.
Incessant trade rumors followed, rumors Sosa believed emanated from the Cubs’ front office. In mid-May of 2000, there were protracted negotiations with the Yankees, which wounded him. Sosa had single-handedly turned the Cubs into a national story, had lifted baseball on the wings of his hop, kiss, and home runs, and now he was perennial trade bait. By 2001, Sosa had completely repudiated his former five-tool self. After hitting 50 home runs the previous year, Sosa smacked 64 in 2001, but didn’t steal a single base. Excluding Sosa, there had been just five 60 home run seasons in the history of baseball. Sosa had three in four years. Yet going from 30-30 to 64-0 in just six years was exactly the kind of statistic that spoke for an era in which power had trumped every nuance baseball had to offer.
TO JOE Morgan, the Hall of Fame second baseman and prominent broadcaster, the prevailing attitude around baseball was that it had paid its dues during the 1990s with the strike and the dip in popularity, and now was entitled to enjoy the spoils that came with the home run boom. That, Morgan thought, required a significant suspension of disbelief. Between 1876 and 1994, a span of 118 years, the 50-homer mark had been reached just eighteen times. From 1995 through 2002, a mere eight seasons, the feat was repeated another eighteen times. It was one thing, Morgan believed, for one or two hitters to dominate an era, as was the case in the days of Ruth and Gehrig, Jimmie Foxx and Hank Greenberg, or Mays and Mantle, but it seemed that every season another new name was added to the list of 50 home run hitters. In 2001, Luis Gonzalez, who had never hit more than 31 home runs, hit 57. That total was equaled the next year by the Texas Rangers’ Alex Rodriguez. Rodriguez had hit 52 the year before, a total that was in turn replicated by Cleveland first baseman Jim Thome in 2002. In an eight-year span, nine different players had reached the 50 home run plateau, four of them on multiple occasions. Roger Maris’s 61-homer mark, meanwhile, had been eclipsed six times between 1998 and 2001. A teammate of George Foster when Foster hit 52 home runs in 1977, Morgan knew that there were gifted hitters in the game, but were they so much more gifted than players of his generation such as Aaron, Mantle, and Mays?
There was plenty to debate about, but Morgan found that dissenting voices were not particularly welcome, even on the air, where differences in opinion made for great television. There was nothing worse for a television executive, or for the viewers at home, than a boring broadcast, yet Morgan found himself often gently (and sometimes not so gently) chided for his on-air commentary. What his bosses
at ESPN wanted was for Morgan to celebrate baseball’s resurgence. That was his job. They did not want his analysis to question the boom. “There would be times when I would make comments about what I was seeing out there, especially when players had no business driving balls to different parts of the ballpark. I’m talking about guys who had no business hitting the ball with that kind of authority. To me, it was just obvious that the nature of the game was different. Hitters could now do things they couldn’t do for a hundred years.
“But I remember bringing some of these things up during the broadcast and would later be told, ‘Joe, that’s not what we’re trying to do here. We’re trying to promote the game, not tear it down.’ That was mostly why you couldn’t even bring up the idea that these players were stronger or that the game had messed with the ball. These were subjects you were supposed to avoid. You were taking a conversation to a direction nobody wanted to go.”
Bob Costas was frustrated by the internal backlash. “I definitely got some feedback, but not from NBC. Dick Ebersol, to his credit, never pressured me about that sort of thing and I was clearly the only one on either the networks or ESPN consistently talking about the game’s systemic problems, but I know there were people who tried to dismiss that as inappropriate or ‘who does he think he is, a professor or something?’ I talked about the distortion of the game’s statistics and had to put up with the inane reaction of ‘he’s just a nostalgist who’s concerned that Carlos Delgado will hit more homers than Mickey Mantle.’ It’s just bullshit that wears you out. I think it was glaring that the game was going through all these changes, and no matter how you feel about them, they were the overarching story of the decade, and a lot of guys who were only too willing to debate for half an hour whether the infield should be in or back - didn’t want any part of these larger issues,” he said.
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