Words Fail

MLB.com would be better off crashing than to print the story I just read, “1998 was amazing, don’t let anyone say otherwise,” by Will Leitch.  The piece alternates between fiction and fantasy.

 

Most of the story concerns recent college-grad Leitch swept up in the faux pursuit of Roger Maris by juicers Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.  “There is no disputing that 1998 was an excellent year,” writes Leitch,” and people did things like” actually watch a regular season baseball game.

 

Leitch called his father on seeing McGwire hit his 62^nd PEDS-infused homerun of the season.  He did it because it was a “moment everyone knew they’d remember forever, and that’s a time you want to call your dad.”  I’ll get back to that in a second.

 

First, consider Leitch’s take on the taint that hangs over 1998:  “There is now a sense that this moment…isn’t supposed to mean as much.  That we are supposed to feel duped, that all the good feeling that moment, that season, engendered wasn’t real, that it didn’t happen.

 

“But it did happen.  Whatever your thoughts about it now—and those thoughts are themselves complicated—all that happened in 1998,” the McGwire/Sosa pursuit of Maris first and foremost, “was thrilling, and exhilarating, and uniting, and glorious.  It was wonderful.”  Note:  That last sentence wasn’t printed in bold on MLB.com, but in blue.  Potato, potahto.

 

Where to begin?  How about this—lies don’t unite.  See George W. Bush and weapons of mass destruction.  Lies ultimately don’t thrill or exhilarate, either; they disappoint and lead to cynicism that can grow corrosive.  If thoughts about someone’s dishonest behavior can be complicated (and some examples would’ve been nice here), they sure aren’t for me about Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa.

 

Unlike Leitch, I didn’t need a phone to be in touch with my 85-year old father.  If memory serves, I was in a hospital room with him, as he began a physical decline that would take him from us in December of 2000.  The television in his room had the game on, though he was probably asleep.  If I happened to look up and see McGwire connect, I was witness to a lie.  My father taught me the value of honesty, as learned by a Bridgeport boy raised by his mother.

 

When I think of the so-called homerun pursuit of McGwire and Sosa, I think of two athletes in the prime of their lives, thanks in part to chemical enhancement.  I also think of a man made weak in old age, but only of body.  In mind and spirit, he was more than Mark McGwire of Sammy Sosa could ever hope to be.  That I’ll remember always.