The Greatest Season Ever
When you sit down to tell the grandchildren the story, you might as well start out like this: Once upon a time.... For that is how all great fables begin. And when you do tell the tale of Mark McGwire and the great home run race of 1998, you should be careful to linger over each detail of the ending, smiling to yourself at how preposterous it is that every last bit of it is true.
At 8:39 p.m. CDT on the last Friday of the season, McGwire didn't even have the most home runs in the National League Central, let alone the most ever in one season. Just 45 minutes earlier in Houston, Sammy Sosa, the Chicago Cubs' redoubtable yang to McGwire's yin, had overtaken McGwire in a contest that resembled in its madness and score an NCAA basketball tournament game, 66-65. St. Louisans were aghast with fear. Even before the operator inside the Busch Stadium scoreboard replaced the 65 placard next to Sosa's name with a 66, McGwire, who was in the field at the time, knew what had happened. He could tell from the groans and murmurs of 48,159 fans. It was what anxiety sounds like.
McGwire himself was frazzled, looking like a downed power line in a storm. You could see the sparks, but the energy he worked up every day of the season to create what he called his "tunnel vision" of concentration had fried his mental circuits. He was darkly jovial as he walked to a press conference before that game last Friday. He took a gulp from his coffee cup and offered without prompting, "Seventy-two hours to go! It feels like a judge has sprung me. Seventy-two hours to freedom!"
Now McGwire was batting in the fifth inning, with a 1-and-2 count, against righthander Shayne Bennett of the Montreal Expos. The moment felt charged, the way it does when you're reading a great novel and the number of pages on the right side of the book gets thinner in your fingers. The excitement of the ending, still very much a mystery, was palpable.
The season's grand finale began when McGwire pounded an inside fastball from Bennett into the lower deck in leftfield, a home run that prompted "a great big sigh" when he got back to the dugout, teammate Tom Lampkin said. In all, McGwire would blast five home runs with his last 19 swings. Most amazingly, his historic season that began on Opening Day with a grand slam ended with home runs on each of his final two swings, the last one a game-winning lightning bolt that left him with a number—70—as jaw-droppingly round as Babe Ruth's 60 seemed in 1927. "Obviously, it's a huge number," McGwire said on Sunday night. "I think the magnitude of the number won't be understood for a while. I mean, it's unheard of for somebody to hit 70 home runs. So, I'm like in awe of myself right now."
Said Montreal manager Felipe Alou, "To hit 70 balls out in batting practice during a season isn't too easy for many people." Then, remembering his fellow Dominican, Alou said sadly, "I feel kind of empty for Sammy Sosa."
There was some consolation for Sosa in that he did, however briefly, join Ruth, Roger Maris and McGwire as holders of the home run record. But weep not for Sosa over the home run race. The first man ever to hit 66 could take solace from reaching the postseason for the first time. His streak of 1,247 games in the major leagues, ending with the Cubs' 5-3 victory on Monday night over the San Francisco Giants in a one-game playoff for the National League wild-card berth (page 54), was the longest active postseasonless streak of any big leaguer, except Dave Martinez of the Tampa Bay Devil Rays.
In his last 40 games McGwire smashed 23 home runs, such a ridiculous sum that it would have led the Cardinals in 22 of the previous 32 seasons. The last three games in particular put him not just in the company of Ruth, who hit 17 homers in September 1927, and Ted Williams, whose six hits in eight at bats on the final day of the 1941 season gave him a .406 average. No, McGwire also joined Michael Jordan, Secretariat and Aesop among the greatest finishers of all time. "I can't believe I did it," he told reporters at his final postgame press conference. "Can you? It's absolutely amazing. It blows me away."
Believe. The chase by McGwire and Sosa of Maris's record 61 home runs—and then of each other—spread the religion of baseball. Cardinals and Cubs games had the feel of revival meetings. No other teams in baseball averaged more fans on the road. And baseball, a setup line to cruel jokes during and after the 1994-95 strike, regained its honor. Hardly anyone complained about the length of games or nitpicked about Nielsen ratings. Hallelujah!
MARK MCGWIRE, said a sign at Busch Stadium on Sunday, THE BEST THERE EVER WAS. The same could be said for the 1998 season. Williams's run at .400 and Joe DiMaggio's 56-game hitting streak made '41 special. The races in '08 were so tight that four teams came within 1 1/2 games of a pennant. But no other year was so full of seismic events that shook even casual and never-before fans into paying attention. And St. Louis was the epicenter.
"As far as I'm concerned, it's the best season ever," says Alou, who has spent 40 years in baseball. "The game has emerged from the grave with thunder. You don't hear about the strike anymore. Sometimes, something has to almost die, like baseball did, for the miracle to take place. The average fan has more faith in the game now."
In addition to 70, baseball welcomed 2,632 and 114 into its sacred numerology. Nineteen ninety-eight was the season Cal Ripken Jr. voluntarily ended his 16-year run of consecutive games played and the New York Yankees collected wins as if they were snowflakes in a blizzard—so many of them but no two exactly alike. No American League team (and only the Cubs of 92 years ago) had ever won more games.
In May alone the Cubs' Kerry Wood pitched one of the most dominating games in baseball history (20 strikeouts, no walks and one infield hit), the Yankees' David Wells threw only the fifth perfect game by a lefthander, and the Los Angeles Dodgers pulled off the trade of the century: a seven-player deal that saw $108.1 million worth of contracts change hands and included three starters from the defending world champion Florida Marlins as well as Mike Piazza, the best hitter in Los Angeles history. The Marlins then shipped Piazza to the New York Mets seven days later.
In July the Seattle Mariners traded Randy Johnson, who has struck out batters at a higher rate (10.6 per nine innings) than anyone in history, to the Houston Astros for three minor leaguers. Thereafter, Johnson was responsible for as many sellouts (two) as runs allowed (two) in five starts at the Astrodome. He struck out 329 batters overall, the seventh-highest total in history. Because that total was split between two leagues, Toronto Blue Jays righthander Roger Clemens was able to join Sandy Koufax, Lefty Grove and Grover Cleveland Alexander as the only pitchers to win back-to-back pitching Triple Crowns (leading a league in wins, ERA and strikeouts).
With all that going on, what would have been marquee achievements in other years became footnotes (chart, page 44). Seattle's Alex Rodriguez set an American League record for home runs by a shortstop (42), became the third player to reach 40 home runs and 40 stolen bases in a season and, followed by the Yankees' Derek Jeter and the Boston Red Sox' Nomar Garciaparra, led a holy trinity of young shortstops to a 1-3-5 finish in hits among American League players. Ken Griffey Jr. became the youngest player to hit 350 home runs—halfway to 700 at age 28. "If he wants to," says Alou, "he can hit 800 home runs."
It was the season that didn't want to end, judging by the wild finish of the National League wild-card race. The Cubs, the Giants and the Mets all lost on the final scheduled day of the season, with Chicago and San Francisco losing seconds apart on the last swings of their games to set up only the fifth one-game tie-breaking playoff in history.
"It's good to get the focus back on baseball, the way it used to be," said outfielder Ray Lankford of the Cardinals. "I think everyone—the players and the fans—got caught up the last few years looking at the financial end of it. Now everyone's just enjoying great baseball. It's like the way it was when we were kids."
Baseball was a cool topic at the water cooler again, and nothing stirred the conversation as the home run race did. McGwire or Sosa? Who do you like? How many will they hit? Even McGwire played the game. On Sept. 21, with 65 dingers on the eve of his last six games, he asked his close friend Ali Dickson to guess the final number and keep it a secret. She wrote it down on a piece of paper and stashed it away.
Heads of state paid attention and homage. The President of the United States congratulated McGwire upon home run number 62. The President of the Czech Republic invoked McGwire's and Sosa's names during his visit to Washington. The Prime Minister of Japan sent Big Mac a letter. The music industry plugged in, with Bruce Springsteen, Steven Tyler, Bruce Hornsby and the Dixie Chicks among those requesting audiences with McGwire in September.
The sports world felt like the 1950s again, with a locked-out NBA suddenly irrelevant and an overshadowed NFL pushed to the inside pages of sports sections. The definitive moment of reclamation for baseball came on Sunday, when the crowd at the St. Louis Rams-Arizona Cardinals football game, being played a few blocks from Busch Stadium, made so much noise on a third-and-nine play that the disoriented Rams took an illegal motion penalty. The reason for the distraction? McGwire had just hit his 69th.
The home run race left its imprint everywhere, including on the scoreboards of Senior PGA events, where golfer Hugh Baiocchi looked up to see SOSA 61 on the leader board in late September and wondered, Who the devil is Sosa? He must have come out of the pack.
At another Senior event, outside St. Louis last Saturday, golfer Larry Nelson heard a roar go up as a competitor's shot hit the fringe of the 14th green and rolled off. Wow, this is a tough crowd, Nelson thought. They must really hate this guy. Then he learned the fans were reacting to McGwire's 67th. Big Mac's home runs traveled—and well beyond the mountainous total of 29,598 accumulated feet his 70 blasts were measured at.
"There was only one thing we wanted from him," said Marilyn Chapman, the wife of the 48-year-old man who caught and returned McGwire's 66th home run ball. "That was a hug. And it was a good hug."
McGwire and Sosa restored baseball's importance as the last great civil game, a worthy and welcome thing at a time when politics and television have coagulated into such an unseemly mess that Peter Jennings and Jerry Springer cover similar ground. Of course, McGwire's manners belied the ferocity with which he set the record. He had a slugging percentage of .752—only Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Rogers Hornsby have done better—while whacking one out of every five balls he put into play out of the park. "You try to think of more adjectives, but you run out of them," Tom Lampkin said last Saturday. "You run out of words in the thesaurus. The one word that keeps popping up is unbelievable. It's truly unbelievable."
McGwire lost more balls against the Expos than a weekend duffer at Sawgrass. On Friday, Saturday and Sunday he belted homers against Montreal's Bennett, Dustin Hermanson, Kirk Bullinger, Mike Thurman and Carl Pavano, none of whom was older than 28 or had pitched in the big leagues before 1997. The one against Bullinger on Saturday was clocked at 111 mph going out. "It was a laser going past me," Bullinger said afterward. "By the time I turned around, it was landing in the bleachers."
Thurman gave up home run number 69 in the third inning on Sunday, a majestic rainbow into the lower deck in left. In the fifth, with a base open and orders from Alou against giving McGwire anything to hit, Thurman walked Big Mac on four pitches. Then, in the seventh with two runners on, two outs and the score tied 3-3, Alou said nothing to Pavano. "I left it up to God and history," Alou said later. "I didn't want to tamper with history."
Said Pavano, "I was going right after him. He went right after me." McGwire sent Pavano's 96-mph fastball screaming over the leftfield wall with such pace that it may as well have been marked TITLEIST as RAWLINGS.
Now it was safe for Dickson to reveal to McGwire on their plane ride home to California what number she had written down at the start of the week: 71. "And really, if you count the home run in Milwaukee, that's what it was," she said, recalling the fan-interference call by umpire Bob Davidson on Sept. 20, which turned a possible home run into a double.
Not DiMaggio's streak or any pennant race held us spellbound for so long as did the great home run race. Excluding the All-Star break, Sosa or McGwire homered on more days (90) than they didn't (88). The final six weeks were especially frantic, like a movie chase scene, with one or both of them hitting a home run on 26 of the last 40 days—never letting more than two days pass without one.
The best there ever was. This is how the story ends. It made
believers of us all.