Life was good in the summer of 1998. Two of Major League Baseball’s most lovable sluggers, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Mark McGwire and the Chicago Cubs’ Sammy Sosa, engaged in a scintillating race to win baseball’s home run crown, shattering power-hitting records and flexing their tremendous biceps along the way. Ballpark attendance was up (70,601,147 fans attended games that year, up from 63,168,689 in 1997), and America’s favorite pastime was finally thriving like it did before the players’ strike in 1994.
Powerful team owners, like many Americans in the mid- and late-90’s, were making and spending an astonishing amount of money.
Looking back, was Major League Baseball’s roller-coaster-like transformation over the next decade far removed from the dramatic swings our nation, and particularly its economy, endured over the same time span?
While Big Mac (McGuire) and Slammin’ Sammy (Sosa) were tearing the seams off of baseballs, the good times were ultimately short lived. On August 7, the U.S. Embassy’s in East Africa were bombed, bringing Osama Bin Laden to the forefront of America’s attention for the first time.
As America found itself in transition at the turn of the century, baseball’s mammoth cleanup hitters almost simultaneously lost their moxie. President Clinton was impeached , rampant steroid usage plagued baseball, maniacal terrorists flew hijacked airplanes into buildings and suddenly many of those big spenders during the Clinton years were accused of crippling our economy.
Corporate America came to its knees; home runs stopped flying out of ballparks. Continue reading
