On This Date In Baseball History.
We hear that phrase all the time on broadcasts of games and read it all the time in small print on sports pages. No sport has the history of numbers and the desire to attach them to the calendar for celebratory purposes as does baseball.
Yet Monday slipped by our national pastime on tiptoes. Unless I missed it, there were no fireworks, testimonials or F-16 flyovers to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the evening when Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals stroked his 62nd home run of the 1998 season off the Cubs’ Steve Trachsel.
That blast broke the existing record established in 1961 by Roger Maris. Family members of the deceased slugger partook of the landmark occasion in person, and even members of the Cubs congratulated McGwire as he toured the bases.
No less an authority than Commissioner Bud Selig intoned that McGwire, and sidekick Sammy Sosa of the Cubs, helped to “save” baseball with that power surge after a job action precipitated cancellation of the 1994 World Series.
McGwire finished with 70 home runs, Sosa with 66, and everything was wonderful. As MLB advertisements reminded us, chicks dig the long ball, although some naysayers suspected it was juiced. But who cared? Even the Cubs made the playoffs, at least for a while.
What a fun summer it was. Normally, baseball would have puffed its chest out Monday and thrown itself a party.
At stadiums throughout the land, videos would have been shown. There would have been TV specials and radio recordings, and periodicals would have devoted columns to words, pictures and charts. McGwire would have been brought back to St. Louis for a parade, Sosa would have come to pop a cork. With baseball rolling in money, no expense would have been spared.
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Instead, with rare exception, the institution and its fans treated Sept. 8 for what it was — just another Monday to go back to work. The background was so quiet, you would have thought Barry Bonds had just passed Hank Aaron’s career home run standard.
Rick Hummel, a Hall of Fame writer with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, authored a lengthy piece in which McGwire actually was quoted. One can only imagine how many hoops Hummel had to navigate for that rare interview, but at least he got his man. USA Today, our nation’s conscience, tried, and McGwire was unavailable again.
McGwire did not exactly lavish readers with details, in keeping with his performance during congressional drug hearings when he played defense better than the Super Bowl XX Bears: “I am not here to talk about the past.” (Meanwhile, Sosa as much as said, “I am not here to talk in English.”) To Hummel, McGwire said, “People can think what they want.”
On that count, McGwire is correct. In the last 10 years, fans have forgiven or forgotten the so-called steroid era that everybody, media included, virtually sanctioned through group silence. Attendance has exploded, destroying en route the myth that baseball does not appeal to younger generations. Look around the next time you go to the park.
Neither McGwire nor Sosa “saved” the game, because the game did not need to be saved. It is the best game of all, regardless of who soils it. Players are just passing through, as witnessed by the public reaction to Sept. 8. There was none. Baseball didn’t have to ignore it; the fans did so without prompting.
The next date to be circled: Oct. 14. That’s when the Cubs clinched their last World Series, in 1908. Where will they be 100 years later?