by Joe Buck
Mark had a story he couldn’t wait to tell me.
While the team was in Atlanta, Mark and a friend went to a strip joint downtown called the Cheetah Club. The bouncer came up to him in the VIP room and said, “Mark, there’s some old dude down there, some white-haired guy, says he knows you, says he’s with the Cardinals and he wants to come up.”
Mark said: “No way . . . Jack Buck! Hell yeah! Bring him up.”
He said my dad came in and started telling jokes. He had the strippers laughing so hard.
Three weeks later, the Cardinals dedicated a statue of my dad. They placed it in front of the old Busch Stadium. (They hadn’t moved to the new one yet.) It was a beautiful tribute, and it was another sign that my father was in the late innings of his career. The year before, he had published his autobiography. It was called Jack Buck: That’s a Winner. When I read the first chapter of the manuscript, I didn’t think it sounded like him. So I rewrote the chapter for him.
But in front of a microphone, he was so good at finding the right words. As the Cardinals honored him at home plate, he stood up there, shaking with Parkinson’s, and said:
“I’ve given the Cardinals the best years of my life . . . and now I’m going to give them the worst.”
McGwire was off to the side, calling my dad Cheetah. He kept yelling, “Cheetah! Cheetah!”*
Mark is a very private person. When we were on charters together, I’d talk to him for the majority of the flight. He had just gotten divorced, and we would talk about that, or other stuff that had very little to do with baseball. He would chew on the cap of a water bottle until it was flat. Other players left him alone.
He’d ask me, “Oh, what game are you doing this week on FOX? Let me guess: Yankees–Red Sox.”
I’d say, “Yeah. Yankees–Red Sox.”
He would ask why those teams were always on FOX, and I’d say, “Let me tell you why: because people watch.” Is there an East Coast bias? Absolutely, there is. Networks are biased toward getting viewers.
McGwire was one of the first people to give me crap for all those Yankees and Red Sox games on FOX. And the funny thing was that I don’t think he really enjoyed being on national TV himself. He didn’t like being near the spotlight at all. But he wouldn’t be able to avoid it in 1998.
—
It was clear, from the start of the 1998 season, that McGwire was chasing history. He hit home runs in each of the Cardinals’ first four games. In one game in mid-April, he hit three. In one game in mid-May, he hit three again. By the end of May, he had 27.
As every American sports fan knew, the single-season record was 61, hit by Roger Maris in 1961. It might have been the most hallowed record in sports. McGwire had hit 58 the year before, and now he was hitting them at an even faster pace. The chase was on.
Fans came out in droves just to watch Mark take batting practice, which baffled him. He didn’t understand the fuss. One time, in Montreal, he stepped to the plate for BP and started hitting balls where balls had never been hit before in Olympic Stadium. The fans there were oohing and aahing and whistling—that shrill whistling they do when they see something amazing.
He turned to me and said, “What are they . . .”
I said, “Mark, nobody sees this. It’s a freak show, and you’re providing it.”
The same thing happened at Dodger Stadium. Mark went to USC. They loved him in California. When he would get in the cage, they always played the Fatboy Slim song “Praise You.” Mark was hitting these bombs in batting practice, and for a lot of paying customers, that show was as good as the game.
But he didn’t like it. He would be out to eat and somebody would interrupt him mid-bite. He hated that. And yet, he would get to the ballpark, with all eyes on him, and continually do one of the toughest things in sports: crush major-league pitching.
It was an incredible thing to watch up close every day. Adding to the thrill: Even though Maris set the record as a Yankee, he also played for the Cardinals, and was one of Mike Shannon’s best friends. My dad had befriended him as well. I had met Maris a couple of times in my dad’s radio booth after he retired. Maris was just hanging out.
So when McGwire chased Maris’s record of 61 home runs, it was history for the big world of baseball, but also a really cool moment in our smaller world: a Cardinal we knew, chasing a former Cardinal that my father knew. Maris had died in 1985, so there weren’t many people who really knew both him and McGwire well. But my dad did.
As it turned out, McGwire’s biggest competition for the single-season title was not even Maris but a power hitter from the Chicago Cubs, Sammy Sosa. They went back and forth all summer, but by early September, you could see that McGwire would break the record first. And in a serendipitous bit of scheduling, he was sitting on 60 home runs when Sosa’s Cubs visited St. Louis.
McGwire hit a home run on Monday night to tie Maris at 61. The next night, Ed Goren and David Hill got FOX to bump all the prime-time programming so we could show McGwire’s attempt to hit number 62. That was incredible: bumping prime-time programming for a regular-season baseball game. But in 1998, it was the right call.
McGwire tried to limit his media sessions because he was so uncomfortable talking about himself. But that night, I got to do a sit-down interview with Sosa and McGwire together. I interviewed both of them, ping-ponging back and forth. It was less than three hours before first pitch. If he had been Mark McGwire of the Atlanta Braves, I might not have gotten that interview. But through all of our time together with the Cardinals, we had become friends.
They got up at the end of the interview. Sosa was the first one to walk out. McGwire was trailing him. Mark came up to me and said:
“Better be ready to make the call tonight. It’s happening.”
It’s happening.
That was not in character for him. Some guys talk trash in their sleep. McGwire never did it. All year, he kept saying he was just trying to play baseball. I was stunned. Thinking about that gives me chills, even today.
—
I was twenty-nine years old, and I already knew McGwire was right: I had to be ready. All summer, because I did Cardinals games, people were asking me, “What are you going to say when he breaks the record?”
I’d say, “Whatever strikes me.”
I wasn’t being coy. That’s just not how I do the job. But then somebody else would ask me. And somebody else. He got to 50 home runs. More people asked me. Then he got to 55. And more people asked.
I still wasn’t thinking about it. Then he got to the high 50s, and people were saying, “Well, it could happen next week. What are you going to say, Joe?”
And then my bosses at FOX moved their whole night of programming to make this a national TV game.
Suddenly, winging it did not seem like a good idea. I went to bed thinking about what I was going to say. I woke up thinking about it. I finally came up with something. I wrote this little script in my scorebook: McGwire around the bases, and into the history books!
McGwire stepped in for his second plate appearance of the game in the fourth inning. All of his home runs had seemed like missile launchings—when the ball left the bat, you just wondered which deck it would puncture. I was ready for another moon shot.
This time, there was no moon shot. McGwire hit this screaming line drive toward left field. It hooked down into the corner. Could have been a homer. Could have been off the wall for a double. Could have been foul. I was standing one booth to the right from my normal spot with the Cardinals, in the national booth, so I had a better angle on that scorcher into the left-field corner than I normally would.
I could see it barely get over and barely stay fair for number 62.
I had to keep my head up and make sure that it was gone before I called it. So I didn’t even have a chance to look down to read the stupid script I wrote.
Instead, I said: “D
own the left-field line . . . is it enough? Gone! There it is!”
Sosa was in right field, clapping. And because I kept my head up, instead of looking at this script, I saw that McGwire was so excited, he missed first base on his home-run trot. He had to go back. This gave me an opening:
“Touch first, Mark! You are the new single-season home-run king!”
I think it worked because it was so obviously not scripted. I had no idea McGwire would miss first base. And I stopped talking after that for around three minutes, while McGwire picked up his kids, hugged his teammates, and even hugged Sosa, who ran in from right field to congratulate him. Then he went into the stands and hugged Maris’s family. It was one of the greatest lessons I’ve ever had in my career. I learned to trust myself. Trust what I see. Don’t write some cheesy script beforehand. That’s not what makes sports fun.
After the game, Mark was trying to set another record: for hugs. He had already hugged damn near everybody in the stadium, including groundskeepers and guys on the opposing team, the Cubs, who were in a pennant race. He had his family on the field with him. I was there to interview him. He hugged everybody in his family, and I was standing there.
So he hugged me.
I got some grief for it. I understand. But I didn’t feel like I could say, “Hey, no! Don’t hug me! I’m the broadcaster guy!” It was just a mutual thing because he was a buddy.
It crossed the line, and it was a mistake. But when it was going on, it didn’t feel weird. I liked him and I admired him. I was appreciative of what he had done for me that whole year, him bothering to sit down and do that interview. I found him to be a great guy.
McGwire had caught Maris, but he still had to fend off Sosa. He did it, finishing with 70 home runs, including two on the last day. (Sosa finished with 66.) I did the game where he hit number 70 for FOX Midwest. Incredible. All those years, people said nobody would ever hit 62 home runs, and this guy hit 70.
It almost didn’t feel real. Some people would argue it wasn’t.
—
Mark McGwire took performance-enhancing drugs. You are probably aware of this. He admitted it, and by the time he admitted it, most Americans assumed it was true anyway. It has probably kept him out of the Hall of Fame.
A lot of people have said that the media all knew he was on steroids back then, and we turned a blind eye toward it. I think that’s revisionist history. During McGwire’s home-run chase in 1998, Steve Wilstein, a reporter for the Associated Press, reported that McGwire kept androstenedione in his locker. So somebody did report it, but most of us had no concept of the scope of what was happening. I’d never heard of andro. The next thing I knew, I was doing an interview about it with Shepard Smith on FOX News. But it still didn’t seem like a smoking gun to me.
There were suspicions that some guys might have been on steroids, but that dated back to the eighties, if not the seventies.
Whitey Herzog had a theory that makes a lot of sense: Steroids got into baseball when all the multipurpose stadiums were built. The football Cardinals were working out with the baseball Cardinals. The Raiders were working out with the A’s, the Steelers with the Pirates, the Reds with the Bengals. They were sharing weight rooms. The facilities weren’t what they are now. The football guys would show up, and the baseball guys would look at them and say, “Wow, how did you get so big?” Steroids were all over the NFL then. So it’s logical that it would go from one sport to the other.
Who knows when it started? If you think that no players from the seventies and eighties did steroids, that is naïve at best. It would not surprise me if a Hall of Famer or two from that era used performance enhancers.
So were there rumblings about steroids in 1998? Absolutely. Was McGwire one name on a long list of suspects? No doubt about it.
Were reporters standing in a big circle in the clubhouse, watching McGwire get injected with steroids?
Hell no.
When Mark was hitting all those home runs, I guess I had a vague sense that he might be on steroids, but I really didn’t give it a lot of thought. Apparently, I was not alone, because most of the media and most of the country celebrated his achievement without reservation.
Eventually, Ken Caminiti revealed he took steroids when he won the National League MVP, and Jose Canseco wrote his tell-all book, and we heard more about Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sosa, McGwire, and others. I thought about it more. When Mark told a congressional committee that he was “not here to talk about the past,” it was pretty obvious. I mean, if your wife accused you of cheating on you, and you were innocent, you wouldn’t say, “I’m not here to talk about the past.” You’d swear from here to China that you were faithful.
He had obviously lawyered up—and lawyered up very poorly. He didn’t want to perjure himself, but at the same time, he should have said more. Remember, Mark was uncomfortable with positive attention. You can imagine how uncomfortable he was as he testified before Congress. But he should have just told the whole truth, and I think he would have seemed human.
Knowing what we know now, it’s easy to rip the media in the nineties, including me. But back then, what did we really know? I mean, what are you supposed to say as an announcer? What a home run! Look at the muscles on this guy! Makes you wonder if he is on steroids, doesn’t it? And the Cardinals lead, 6–2, with two outs in the sixth . . .
It’s easy for people to say now, “You’re supposed to be the one to stand up and call it all a farce.”
Well, first of all, it still doesn’t feel like a farce to me. This is just my opinion. But for as many guys as there were hitting home runs juiced up on steroids, there were plenty of pitchers on the mound equally juiced up. It was all relative to the era.
Do McGwire’s 70 home runs denigrate the record book? Yeah. But it happened because the stuff became available to these guys. I don’t think that the guys in the sixties and fifties were better human beings and wouldn’t have taken it. They just never had the opportunity to take performance-enhancing drugs.
Or I should say: They never had the opportunity to take those drugs. They could take greenies, which are amphetamines. Those were used a lot in the years before anybody ever heard of Mark McGwire, and to me, a greenie is as much a performance-enhancing drug as steroids.
There is no doubt that the drugs gave him more power. But I think the biggest advantage was being able to physically recover every day. I am personally convinced that these guys are led to taking some sort of performance-enhancing supplement because of the schedule. Sometimes they play thirty-six games in thirty-seven days. I just don’t know how a body does that. The performance enhancers get them off the trainer’s table more than turning a 390-foot home run into a 500-foot home run.
I know Mark said the steroids didn’t help him hit home runs. My response is: “Well, they did help you hit home runs because they got you off the trainer’s table and into the lineup every day. You can’t hit home runs if you can’t play.”
This is a long way of saying that when I look back on 1998, I still love that season. I know it’s not a popular stance. I know more about what was going on than I did then, but it still doesn’t take the fun away from it for me. And it was fun for a few reasons:
It was this historic chase that nobody thought would happen. People thought the media scrutiny would be too much for any hitter to keep going, and we wouldn’t see anybody break the record in this lifetime. That was the conventional wisdom for many years. That proved to be wrong.
I got to ride alongside my dad, watching this chase. On the road, we would go to the ballpark together, then split up when the game started—him in the radio booth, me doing TV. McGwire’s 62nd home run surpassed all those great moments he broadcast when I was a kid, and I got to do it with him. My dad loved Mark—and every minute of the drama of 1998. Those moments energized him, and his calls reflected that.
I liked the guy who broke the record
. I still do. I’m not going to demonize him for taking steroids.
—
I know that, as a sports announcer, I’m supposed to hyperventilate and shake with anger at athletes who put something in their bodies to “enhance their performance.” I just can’t bring myself to do it. And maybe I’m wrong, but on a daily basis, I don’t think fans are that upset or worried about it.
Baseball is as popular and profitable as it’s ever been. For all of the supposed “outrage” by fans, they rarely turn their backs on their own players. They throw inflatable needles and yell nasty things at opposing players who have been caught. That’s just gamesmanship. Fans cheer when those guys are on their team. The bottom line is that fans haven’t really walked away from sports because of steroid use.
McGwire was wrong to do what he did. But he didn’t do anything out of malice. Deep down, Mark wanted to play, and wanted to play well. He was not chasing fame or money. He hated all the trappings that went with being Mark McGwire. I think that’s why he walked away when he did.
People forget this, but he walked away from $30 million at the end of his career. He had it coming to him. All he had to do was not retire. He didn’t even have to play. He could have been a batting-practice draw and an occasional pinch hitter, or he could have been released and he still would have gotten that $30 million. After all the money Mark had made for the Cardinals, that $30 million was change under the couch cushions to them. But he chose to walk away from the money. That’s admirable. I mean, if you’re going to talk about the bad stuff a guy did, talk about the good, too.
—
McGwire’s “once-in-a-lifetime” achievement did not last very long. In 2001, Barry Bonds hit 73 home runs. That didn’t feel the same to most of America, because the record was only three years old, and also because he was Barry Bonds.
McGwire didn’t like attention. Bonds seemed as if he didn’t even like people. I had experienced this firsthand. In the early ninties, I was chatting with Don Baylor, the Cardinals hitting coach, before a game against Pittsburgh. I would get to the ballpark really early and I would sit in the dugout and talk about hitting and life with Baylor. It was a wonderful education. Baylor is such a great guy.