Why did I cheer the Great Home Run Race?

" In the past decade the game and the bodies of those who play it have lost their cartoonish outrageousness, as have the statistics they produce. In the nine seasons before steroid testing, players crashed the 50-home run threshold 18 times, the 60-home run barrier six times. In the nine seasons with testing, there have been only six 50-homer seasons. Nobody has hit 60."  -  'To Cheat or Not to Cheat' by Tom Verducci, Sports Illustrated, June 4 2012

Do you remember the Great Home Run Race?   Sosa and McGuire, duking it out with each other and the ghost of Maris... and even the wraith of The Babe channeled through Maris' stress and discomfort?   How we cheered as the laughing Sammy and the taciturn McGuire stalked and hunted one of the most vaunted records in the game of baseball.

It was a heady time.  For me personally, it became a healing catharsis of sorts, helping  pull me back to baseball after the disaster of the cancelled World Series of 1994.  I remember listening with my wife to the radio in the car as McGuire tied the record.  It was a great time, and I cheered as loud as any fan returning to the Great Game.

Within just a few years, an absolute nimrod would come along and eclipse the whole thing.. both the record and feelings.  Like a harbinger of doom, that man's record chase was the crack in the door through which we all peeked and saw the filth within.... the home run chase that we cheered was a sham... a vial of snake oil sold to unsuspecting commoners at the county fair.

We should have known.  I should have known.  I have more than my fair share of cynic in me.  If this were the movie "Eight Men Out", I would be one of the sportswriters (the portly, dumpy one, not the tall, thin one) casting a jaded eye on the whole process, circling the faces of the players that I knew were doing something wrong no matter what the charged atmosphere.

So now, years later... I wonder... why did I cheer?  I wish I hadn't.

You might ask... why does it matter?  And to that, I would answer this:  one of the great attractions of baseball is that it is played by men of relatively normal statures.  I measure in at 6' 2" tall... and almost all the point guards in the NBA are 5-6" taller than I am.  Football players are ginormous.  Olympic swimmers have wingspans wider than they are tall, or can bend their feet completely back and some such.   Baseball is a game that can be played by guys like David Wells and John Kruk.   Hand-eye coordination matters more than hulking mass or freakishly perfect physiology.  Despite the heroic stature we often accord them... these boys of baseball look like us... and that is important.

Steroids changed that.  It turned the boys of baseball into something more than normal, and at the expense of their compatriots who chose not to cheat, and in violation of the trust of fans, and at great cost to themselves.  And those same steroids fueled the Great Home Run Chase, and nothing we do now can undo the taint on that year...

And I look back and think... why did I cheer?

 

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