"I can't quite remember anything like this in sports, and — because baseball at its best is the long novel of American sports — you can't miss a day. You know, football plays once a week, basketball is sort of scattered. Baseball is there every day for you.
And somehow — and in a wonderful way, the conversation of the country, at least temporarily ... has gone from Bill and Monica to Sammy and Mark. And I must say, I much prefer the latter. Because you go to bed at night, and if you haven't watched the game or if you've been out, you rush to the paper, like we did as kids in 1961 with [Roger] Maris and [Mickey] Mantle, until Maris finally pulled away. And this afternoon, they will combine elements of two sports. We got the national pastime in a great baseball city, but we got an old-fashioned one-on-one game."
That was Mike Lupica, New York Daily News sports columnist and ESPN panelist, in a "Good Morning America" transcript dated Sept. 7, 1998. That was the day a series between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals was scheduled to begin at Busch Stadium; a game in which McGwire hit his 61st homer of the season. Just over 24 hours later, Mark McGwire would hit his 62nd, breaking Roger Maris's 37-year-old single-season record.
Anyone who's read a story about McGwire in the last week may find something missing from Lupica's passage, and from the entire interview for that matter: any discussion about performance-enhancing drugs, let alone steroids. Perhaps Lupica didn't have enough time to broach the subject, more concerned with wiping baseball's appreciation off his chin after fellating the sport for two televised segments.
That wasn't the case when Lupica appeared on that same ABC show back on August 24, 1998. This was right after McGwire had admitted to taking Androstenedione — with a Creatine chaser — that was over-the-counter and legal in Major League Baseball. Lupica offered these thoughts on McGwire:
"Look, Mark McGwire hit 49 home runs 11 years ago, before he even heard of this stuff. He's a good hitter ... and we cannot draw any connection between what he's taking and the fact that he has had this surpassing summer. But it is treated as an anabolic steroid by the NFL, by the Olympics, and by the NCAA. Randy Barnes, a shot putter, was banned from track and field for using this stuff. And I think that baseball, which, you know, has a drug policy that you can — you wear as a party hat ... the same as the National Basketball Association, has to look into this thing."
Two weeks later, McGwire's admitted use of performance-enhancing drugs was nowhere on Lupica's radar. Perhaps it didn't fit the narrative of that magical season of baseball Lupica would later profit from with a best-selling book ("The Summer of '98").
Or, perhaps, Lupica was doing what the rest of the hypocrites in the sports media did back in baseball's post-strike renaissance: he was willing to ignore the ills of a game he had adored since childhood just to see it return to prominence through apocryphal, if artificial, means.
And he wasn't alone. Witness a now-hilarious ABC News special titled "Chasing History," hosted by Charles Gibson from baseball's Mecca, the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, NY. Check the transcript: not a single mention of steroids, Andro, Creatine, drug testing, cheating, juiced players, or Jose Canseco. Instead, we get these regrettable platitudes from grown men vicariously re-living their childhoods through the Sosa/McGwire home run race. Look at this exchange, between host Charles Gibson and Boston Globe columnist and ESPN baseball guru Peter Gammons:
CHARLES GIBSON: And Peter, it's interesting that these races come along at such opportune times for baseball. Babe Ruth after the Black Sox scandal in 1919, Maris and Mantle when everybody was saying baseball was getting boring, and now after the strike, we have McGwire and Sosa.
PETER GAMMONS: Well, it's always been that way. It just seems as if — first of all, the home run is a unique act in sports. It's the most Herculean act, it's the one one-on-one shot that, for some reason, has always captured people.
You mentioned Ruth. And then, of course, you had Maris and Mantle. Bobby Thompson sort of wiped out the postwar dreariness attached to sports. And then in the '70s, when people were saying baseball was dead, you had the Fisk and the Reggie Jackson home runs in the World Series. It has always been that one thing that captured the public's imagination and saved baseball. It's always proven that the game has always been able to regenerate itself.
CHARLES GIBSON: Peter, can you say safely — and I'll ask George the same thing — that baseball is back? Because a lot of people said in 1994, they were fed up with baseball after the strike, they wouldn't go to games. They were done, finished?
PETER GAMMONS: Well, I think it is back. I mean, there are still a lot of problems. They still have to somehow deal with the widening gulf between the big markets and the small markets.
Boy, that is a big problem! Forget the fact that one of the principals in this historic, game-saving home run derby had admitted to using a performance enhancing drug to boost his muscle mass ... how are the Kansas City Royals going to re-sign their back-up catcher?
Let's not forget about columnist George Will, who appeared just long enough on the ABC special to unleash this sloppy wet kiss on baseball:
"We're having a happy moment that the country can rally around. Usually people gather around their television sets for scandals, for deaths, assassinations, a space ship blows up. Suddenly, the whole country is warming itself by the television over two people of good character, and there isn't a whiner in the house."
Years later, in an April 4, 2004 column, Will opined:
"Steroids subvert what baseball is selling — fair competition. And they strike at the pleasure of engagement with America's team sport with the longest history. That pleasure is the comparison of players across many generations. Until now, comparisons have been complicated by only one substantial discontinuity in the game's nature — that between the dead and lively ball eras. Steroids threaten to define a second discontinuity."
I guess five years and a surly malcontent chasing Hank Aaron's record changes everything, doesn't it?
Today, Will, Lupica ("The single most valuable currency that we have in sports are the baseball records. And those have been corrupted because the public doesn't trust them now..." — CBS's "Face the Nation"), and Gammons ("McGwire, Jason Giambi, and Barry Bonds are not victims; they are very, very, very rich. But they were hardly the only players suspected of using enhancing-performing drugs, part of the subculture that the leaders never discouraged." — ESPN column, March 18, 2005) are focused on steroids like Sosa on a hanging curveball. They, like most of the sports media, are attacking baseball's leadership for not doing enough to police the sport and purge the game of performance-enhancing drugs.
Yet these pundits have more in common with Bug Selig, Donald Fehr, and the rest of MLB's braintrust than they'd like to admit; namely, that they all placed their heads in the sand just deep enough to play blind to the sport's steroid subculture while still being able to hear the cash register ring.
Now, the obvious counterpoint to this view is that we all didn't "know" the steroid scuttlebutt was valid until the BALCO grand jury leaks and admissions from players like Jose Canseco and Ken Caminiti. Prefacing stories about McGwire, Sosa, and Bonds with accusations and rumor would have been towing a libelous line.
I'm not saying baseball writers back in 1998 needed to add a journalist "*" to every article about home run records. I'm just saying that the kind of cynical, wounded tone that permeates today's sports journalism when it comes to baseball is the complete antithesis of the way the game was covered seven years ago.
Can you imagine the scrutiny today's rejuvenated media would have given Caminiti back when he won the NL MVP award with the Padres in 1996? Here's a guy who didn't hit more than 20 home runs in the first seven years of his career, and then hit 26 in 1995, along with 94 RBI in 143 games. Then, in 1996, he hits 40 home runs and had 130 RBI in 146 games.
Jeez ... 14 more home runs and 36 RBI. Where did he play those extra three games? The surface of the moon?
The BALCO stuff and the Canseco finger-pointing confirmed what we had suspected, but in no way did it reveal anything we didn't already fathom. When you first heard Jason Giambi was on the juice, how did you react? "Wow ... that's incredible!" or "I saw that one coming the first time I saw his forearms..."
The Lupicas and Wills of the world were aware that Major League Baseball's steroid testing policies, in comparison with those in other sports, were as toothless as the bathroom mirror in a nursing home. So why didn't they bang the drum a little harder when two players were making a beeline to 61 seven years ago?
Steroids had affected baseball in its post-strike era, and we all were aware of that. How keenly it played on our minds may depend on what generation you're from.
Guys like Lupica, Gammons, Will, and SportsFan Magazine publisher James J. Patterson, who recently wrote a terrific column on the Congressional steroid hearings, are all from a generation that revered baseball as something more than a form of sports entertainment — let's call them the "Baseball As America" crowd.
I turned 28 on Sunday. I'm from a generation of fans that treat baseball in an entirely different manner, because when we were growing up it didn't have the gargantuan stature that it had in the mid-20th century. At no time in my life as a sports fanatic was baseball bigger than football for a substantial period of time; and the NBA, for several years of Michael Jordan's reign, was at least on par with or beyond baseball's popularity.
For myself, and for many fans, baseball is what you watched between football seasons.
Tell that to Lupica back in 1961, and you might see his head explode.
I don't see the steroid debate as a microcosm of the ongoing debates over societal evils and moral indignation. I see it as a bunch of people who hold baseball to some sort of pious standard treating "the integrity of the game" as if it actually still means something. Maybe it's different for a 28-year-old who's grown up seeing about a dozen hitters' ballparks open, the juiced ball of the 1990s, the ever-changing strike zone, over-expansion, and enough medical advancements to keep players active into their 50's. I look at the record book and wonder how anyone could compare a single statistic from the 1960s with those of the 21st century; there really isn't a basis. (Just another reason why a 56-game hitting streak remains one of the only truly worthy records in professional sports.)
The same voices that cheered baseball's resurgence during that magical summer of 1998 are now calling for draconian rules to "clean up the game."
Spare me the urine samples, Congressional hearings, and sanctimonious finger-wagging.
If it wasn't a problem then, why should it be a problem now?
Greg Wyshynski is also a weekly columnist for SportsFan Magazine. His columns appear every Saturday on Sports Central. You can e-mail Greg at [email protected].
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