What did you think in 1998?

You've pretty much summed up my recollection, line for line.

 

I pretty much thought what Dick thought about dietary supplements (and by extension, steroids) as one of a number of factors leading to the home run increase, including souped up baseballs, the new park designs of the '90s and the impact of '90s expansion. Come to think of it, that's pretty much what I believe now. It wasn't until Bonds showed the baseball world state of the art PED use that I saw it could be a dominant factor in improving performance.

 

I covered a lot of baseball that year. In between road trips covering college games, I'd drive or they'd fly me to nearby cities if Sosa or McGwire were playing. I covered a Chicago-StL series in August as things were heating up and when either of those teams played the local team, we'd have 10 reporters at the game. I covered 12 games that McGwire played in that season, six were home games where I was working, there was the series with the Cubs in August which I was sent to at the last minute and then a few others. We couldn't cover it enough.

We had a columnist who told me he thought McGwire was juicing. I told him I used to go to A's games as a teenager and how skinny McGwire was then compared to now. The columnist wrote a column that said, "Something's not right here." but I don't think he ever said steroids in the column. I had a conversation with the columnist later and he said, "Nobody wants to hear my opinion on this." and to some extent he was right.

This was the warmest and fuzziest story we'd seen in a long time. I don't ever remember people paying attention to baseball like it was that year. How much shit did the AP writer get for first mentioning Andro?

I had heard steroid rumors (mostly from angry Giants fans, which I was one of....) during the Bash Brothers days in Oakland. Both of those guys got so big so fast, but there was no testing, so there was no way to know.

This was in the days when every athlete seemed to be endorsing EAS and creatine and all those supplements. I don't know that it was the McGwires and Cansecos that made people thinks steroids were being used, it was when light-hitting infielders started hitting 40 HRs in a season where people started saying, WTF?

 

Michael Jordan was done for good.

 

Brady Anderson hit 50 HRs in 1996. Lenny Dykstra played his last MLB game the same year.

Home run totals were up, but it wasn't across the board, and could not be explained away by a juiced ball and/or "supplements".

 

Why couldn't it have, though?

Funny thing about Anderson. The year he hit 50 home runs, Sports Illustrated ran a profile on him. It was in the same issue as the magazine's steroids cover "Special Report." The piece gushes all over Anderson's power surge, with nary a mention of steroids. I think the "Special Report" starts on the next page. I'm not sure if they did that on purpose as a wink-wink to readers or were actually just as naive as the rest of us.

 

Dykstra's been done 17 years. Insane.

 

This Internet thing is great, but my mom keeps forcing me to log off so she can makes calls

 

The Internet is cool for funny jokes, but I don't see newspapers going away. What are people going to read on the can?

 

"Seinfeld will be back in a year."

 

Gushers are the future of food.