Word: mcgwire
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...That same success is the key to his resurrection. As much as we love tearing down our idols, we're suckers for tales of redemption, and for athletes, that story arc bends through the winner's circle. We never forgave Mark McGwire for the fiasco of his congressional testimony because he was done clubbing home runs. Were Pete Rose still hustling around the basepaths, the stain of his wagers would've long since faded. But history shows that had they been able to atone on the playing field, they might've earned back their pedestals. Kobe Bryant, whose jersey...
...about baseball before the strike in 1994, my earliest memories come from the record-breaking power surge of the late ’90s. Like every fan my age and older, I remember the summer of 1998 for the moments spent scurrying to the nearest TV whenever Sosa or McGwire threatened the records of Ruth and Maris. That summer’s hardball fireworks happened to coincide with a brief hiccup that served as nothing more than a semicolon in a decade-long, run-on sentence of previously unimaginable financial growth. As I was 10 years old, it would...
...Today, McGwire and Sosa are personae non gratae in Cooperstown, and 1998 stands as a glaring reminder of what now appears so obvious: that the good times of the late ’90s were built on something other than Big Mac’s hard-scrabble midwestern work ethic or the Caribbean, Garcia-Marquez-esque, mythical mastery of Slammin’ Sammy. Rather, they were fueled by a toxic cocktail of steroids and willful ignorance...
...Steroids did not give McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, or any other pariahs the ability to hit major-league pitching. All but the most ardent moralists and car-radio screamers would grant that most of the now tarnished stars of baseball’s Juiced Era were skilled ballplayers even without the aid of chemical enhancement. PEDs let great athletes leverage their skills to even higher, previously unimaginable levels. They enabled marginal athletes to make massive sums of money playing a kids game. And they allowed baseball to return to the glory it had lost in the 1994 strike...
...gone before. It was a freak show and baseball loved it. It was the first season in history in which four players hit 50 home runs. Greg Vaughn and Ken Griffey Jr., half of the 50-plus bombers that year, were dwarfed in size, production and attention by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Both McGwire, with 70 home runs, and Sosa, with 66, blew away the record 61 home runs of Roger Maris that had stood as the standard for 37 years. America was captivated by the two huge men and the great home-run race. Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat...