Baseball's 1998 home run chase between the Cubs' Sammy Sosa and Cardinals' Mark McGwire seemed too good to be true.
It was.
Entering that season, Major League Baseball was still reeling from the 1994 strike which forced the cancellation of the '94 World Series. Attendance was down, and baseball, America’s Pastime was on the road to being irrelevant.
Enter Sammy and Big Mac.
“Those guys saved baseball,” said Kerry Wood, who was in his first season with the Cubs in 1998.
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But did they really?
MLB
The quest to break Roger Maris’ single-season home run record of 61 (set in 1961) captured the attention of the nation. ESPN cut away to the pair's at-bats and in the late innings of a game where Sosa had yet to homer, Cubs radio play-by-play man Pat Hughes would simply say “If you are just tuning in, the answer is no, not yet.”
“In ‘98, Mark and I came in and put on a show together,” Sosa told NBC Sports Chicago’s David Kaplan in an interview in 2018. “We shocked the world, and a lot more people started coming to the ballpark.”
In 1996, the first 162-game season after the strike, attendance across the league was just over 60 million, according to Baseball Reference. Two years later, as Sosa and McGwire pounded home runs seeming at will, that number rose to about 70.6 million.
But unfortunately, the Sosa-McGwire home run chase happened right in the middle of the Steroid Era. Performance-enhancing drugs were prevalent around the league and changed the game as we know it. Steroids were banned by baseball in 1991, but testing on major league players didn’t start until 2003.
In 1990, 3,317 home runs were hit in MLB. By 1998, that number was 5,064 and reached 5,693 in 2000.
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Fans couldn’t get enough of Sosa and McGwire. They would come out early to watch batting practice and marvel at the distance balls flew. As the buzz around the pair grew, so did revenues. Those coming to the park early had to eat and drink. They had to pay to park. They wanted souvenirs. If they couldn’t make it to the game in person, they would watch it on television.
It looked like baseball was back but something seemed to be a little off.
When Sosa entered the league in 1989, he was a skinny outfielder. By the time the 1998 season rolled around, his physique was completely different, looking more like a bodybuilder than a typical major league player. When asked about the extra muscles he added, he said it was because he ate Flintstone vitamins.
In 2005, players, including Sosa and McGwire, were called in front of a congressional committee looking into steroid use. Sosa, who was born in the Dominican Republic and came to the United States in 1986, made his comments through an interpreter and denied taking performance-enhancing drugs. McGwire said he was “not here to talk about the past.”
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Sosa has long denied ever using steroids, though in 2009, the New York Times reported he was on a list of players who had tested positive for performance-enhancing drugs in 2003.
In 1998, McGwire admitted to using androstenedione, an over-the-counter muscle enhancer that was banned at the time by the World Anti-Doping Agency and the NFL, but not MLB (it was federally classified as a steroid in 2004). In 2010, McGwire said he had used steroids off and on for over a decade while playing, including during the 1998 season.
Sosa and McGwire’s accomplishments may look great on paper, but it will never get them where every player dreams to one day be, Cooperstown.
Despite being one of nine players with more than 600 homers in major league history, Sosa received only 13.9 percent of the votes on the 2020 Hall of Fame Ballot. McGwire was never named on more than 24 percent of the ballots in his 10 years of eligibility that ended in 2016.
When someone brings up the stats from that era, it always seems to be followed by "Yeah, but…" We’re left to wonder what could have been had McGwire not taken PEDs. Or if Sosa didn't take Flintstone vitamins.
In 1998, Sosa and McGwire made us baseball fans again. Sure, most fans knew there was no way the home runs being hit were done naturally, but at that moment not many seemed to care.
But now fans do.
And the great home run chase is kind of like eating too much cotton candy at the ballpark. It was great to enjoy at the moment, but afterwards it made you feel a little sick.
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