So, What Have You Done for Us Lately?

It's time to put Mark McGwire and baseball up on the shelf next to Neil Armstrong and NASA. It's the same shelf that Orson Welles perched on after Citizen Kane, the one Robert Plant reached after Stairway to Heaven, the one Dustin Hoffman was taking the bus to, with Katharine Ross at his side, at the end of The Graduate. It's the what-can-you-possibly-do-for-an-encore shelf. And, thanks to Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, it's the new home of Baseball 1999: the Season of the Home Run Hangover.

The flaw in having McGwire hit 70 homers last year, and Sosa hitting 66, probably dawned on Commissioner Bud Selig sometime after the winter winds of Milwaukee began to fog up his glasses. Baseball's marketing scheme since the early Nineties has centered on one idea: that the game would recapture the hearts and wallets of America when someone finally challenged Roger Maris' home run record.

But under no circumstances was the damn fool supposed to break it! What's left for the season after the monument falls? How do you sell the public on the pursuit of a one-year-old record? Do you expect people to believe that McGwire will hit 75 homers this year? And if he does, don't you think people will wonder if it's legit? Legendary tightwad Connie Mack once pulled back the veil far enough to reveal that he would rather have had his Philadelphia Athletics finish a strong second every year than to win the pennant, because the fans would keep coming back for more, and he wouldn't have to raise his players' salaries.

Fact is, the breathless television coverage of the home run race climaxed the day McGwire hit his 62nd. As the statistics began to move up toward those of fast-pitch softball or the Longhorn League of 1954, the questions began to crop up. Because of interleague play and expansion, did McGwire and Sosa see a wider range of awful pitchers in one season than Babe Ruth saw in his lifetime? Didn't it matter that from early on, McGwire was hitting in a vacuum? Unlike Maris in 1961, or Ruth in 1920, 1921 or 1927, the closest he got to a pennant race was watching highlights on television. For crying out loud, even Sosa's supposedly playoff-relevant season ended with his Cubs losing nine of their last 12 games.

Then there's the little matter of backlash. Maris took a few healthy knocks in 1961 from Ruth-friendly old-timers. But his real troubles didn't begin until the spring of 1962, when he snubbed a group of powerful New York sportswriters who proceeded to paint him as the undeserving ingrate incarnate. Maris also made the mistake of hitting "only" 33 homers the year after. The tear-him-down process kicked into high (continued on page 148)Olbermann(continued from page 104) gear after the record was set, not while it was being pursued.

It began to kick McGwire last October 17. Who threw out the first pitch at the World Series? Sammy Sosa. Three days later, whom did The Sporting News select as its Player of the Year? Sammy Sosa. Baseball has already begun to put Mark McGwire down and back slowly away from him, and not merely because he probably can't replicate the 70-homer season. He left a time bomb ticking in August, one that could barely be heard over the boosterism of the sports media and national news outlets, one called androstenedione.

Don't just dismiss this performance-enhancing drug as readily as the sports-media complex has done. All it adds is strength, say the defenders; McGwire still has to hit the ball. And what do you suppose makes the difference between 70 homers and 70 fly balls caught at the warning track? And sure, it was legal in baseball in 1998. So was an array of dubious performance-enhancing substances. Yet, not long before the stuff was spied in McGwire's locker, androstenedione had been banned by Australia's National Football League. They are the people who bring you a sport that looks like a cross between rugby and demolition derby. In the Australian NFL, the story goes, the winning team gets to kill and eat the loser. Were he still playing, McGwire's own quarterback brother Dan would've been suspended by our NFL if he'd tried to use the stuff. It's against the rules in college and Olympic competition, no matter the sport. And don't be snowed under by the argument that it's a legal, over-the-counter supplement. That's not only not true in France and Switzerland, but you can't even buy it with a prescription in Canada. This is the stuff the East Germans developed to turn their swimmers into one-third men, one-third women, one-third porpoises. Back here, General Nutrition Centers, the largest retail "health" chain in the country, simply won't sell it. GNC apparently has higher drug standards than major league baseball.

That's another problem. As pitcher-turned-author Jim Bouton pointed out last fall, sooner or later, baseball will have to establish a policy on steroids and testosterone precursors. The ticking got a little louder last October 29 when the Toronto Globe and Mail, quoting an unnamed baseball source, reported that a special joint player-owner committee will have declared androstenedione off-limits within baseball by Opening Day. The choice, simply, was between endorsing androstenedione—which may threaten your life or at least shrink your testicles to the size of peanuts—or banning it. Inevitably that decision slaps an unofficial and retroactive asterisk on McGwire's record.

The saddest part of this inevitable McGwire controversy is that, from a marketing point of view, it may not have even been worth it. With McGwire gone hunting, fishing or andro shopping, and with Sosa and the Cubs vanishing once the big-kid Braves got out of school, the playoff television ratings were up only marginally. The Yankees–Padres World Series actually came in with ratings lower than those of that interminable Indians–Marlins debacle of the previous season.

Baseball claimed a seasonal attendance jump of nearly 12 percent over 1997. But those numbers have not only been cooked, they've been cooked with the sophistication of a fourth grader cheating on a long-division test. Attendance was up 12 percent. The number of franchises was up seven percent—they expanded last year. This means that not counting the 6 million fans who went to the games of the new Arizona and Tampa Bay teams, the actual increase in attendance amounted to only 589 fannies per game.

The images of the "great postseason stage" can't be inspiring to baseball's marketeers. Who will forget the Yankees' Chuck Knoblauch moronically arguing with an umpire while ignoring the still-live baseball—and the game-deciding run—rolling away from him? Or the amazingly bad management by Atlanta's Bobby Cox and then by San Diego's Bruce Bochy (No, no, Bruce, you use the team's best pinch hitter, John Vander Wal, to pinch-hit in the bottom of the ninth of a World Series game, not to pinch-run)? And, of course, there was the apparent outbreak of infectious delusional paranoia among the umpires. The arbiters not only widened or narrowed strike zones as unpredictably as a myopic tailor wearing borrowed eyeglasses, but they threw out one manager three pitches into one game, and—now it can be told—threatened to eject a television set from the American League Championship Series.

The television was the one supplied me by NBC at my reporting vantage point, wedged between the third-base camera and the Indians' dugout. As game six started, third-base umpire John Shulock came over to me and demanded that the eight-inch monitor be angled "away from the field, so players can't see the replays." When one of the Indians tried to view the videotape of a clearly botched call, Shulock raced back to my warren and started screaming at me that he'd warned me once "to move that damn thing away from the dugout" and that if another player even seemed to be looking at it, he would shut the set off and have it removed. To Shulock's credit, he shortly returned to apologize for yelling. To his discredit, it seemed never to have dawned on him that a player seeking to watch a replay in the Bronx needed to jaunt just 44 steps from the dugout to the clubhouse. In Cleveland there were actually two full-size televisions in a room directly behind each dugout. And they had big comfy chairs in front of them.

None of this silliness, of course, diminished the increased esteem Mark McGwire et al. earned for the game. But esteem is a fleeting thing easily upended by whatever nitwitted idea lurks on-deck. The game might never have been stronger, for example, than in August 1994. Then the owners forced a players' strike, canceled the World Series and made many fans wonder why, if there was to be no World Series, they should pay in money or attention for those April weeknight games between the Tigers and the Royals.

The financial end of the sport is still a mess. Big-money teams grab talent as needed. Postseason ticket prices rise so steeply that there were actually thousands of seats empty for the first two NL Championship Series games in Atlanta. Marketing seems random, hokey and sometimes naive. The home run thing has been done, Cal Ripken has benched himself and the next challenge to his ironman streak is at least 2000 games and 13 years away. The wild card produced only a new form of the same old pain for eternally suffering Cubs and Red Sox fans. For every cuddly superstar like Sosa, there is an unpredictable Barry Bonds or an increasingly irritable Ken Griffey.

The game has always managed to survive the stupidity of the people who ran it. Maybe they could even sell it that way: Come watch our executives make every mistake imaginable and still not kill off a tradition that is woven into the fabric of American history! Watch us overcharge you! See the pitching deteriorate before your eyes! Enjoy your favorites today because we're going to trade them away tomorrow! Try to guess which homer left the park through the miracle of androstenedione and which one left under its own power! Or they can push all the outfield fences back 100 feet and see if McGwire can break Chief Wilson's 1912 record of 36 triples in one season. Just so long as the damn fool doesn't actually do it!

The financial end of the sport is still a mess. Marketing seems random, hokey and sometimes naive.