Let me start this off by saying I didn’t get a chance to watch Long Gone Summer, the latest 30 For 30 from ESPN that dives into the summer of 1998 as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa — and don’t forget Ken Griffey Jr. for a while! — chased and broke Roger Maris’s home run record.
But I’ve read a bunch of reviews and seen a ton of tweets on the subject, and it appears a lot of folks had a similar take: there’s the nostalgia of the home run chase and not much else. Anyone hoping for a deeper dive into PEDs and the larger context of that summer in hindsight won’t get it.
Lots of folks connected it to McGwire’s cameo on The Simpsons in 1999. In the episode “Brother’s Little Helper,” Bart is given medicine to help with his diagnosed ADHD and turns completely paranoid, claiming Major League Baseball is spying on everyone. When it turns out he’s actually right, there’s McGwire. Bart asks him why MLB is spying, and the then-Cardinals star responds, “Do you want to know the terrifying truth? Or do you want to see me sock a few dingers?”
That’s how many people on Twitter summed it all up:
