It began, as most great American stories do, in the shadow of disaster. Major League Baseball was limping out of the longest winter in its history — a 232-day strike that had murdered the 1994 World Series, turned fans into bitter exiles, and left a sport bleeding relevance. The national pastime had become the national punchline. Empty ballparks. Asterisks. A generation of kids who'd stopped caring. And then, from the wreckage, two men with forearms like tree trunks and swings that could shake the foundations of stadiums started hitting baseballs farther than anyone had ever hit them before — and in doing so, dragged an entire country back to the game.
The Ghost of 61
Roger Maris's single-season home run record of 61 had stood since 1961, a monument so untouchable that it had taken on mythic weight. Babe Ruth's 60 had fallen to Maris, and then the mark sat there for 37 years, surviving eras of expansion, juiced balls, and the best hitters who ever lived. Mickey Mantle never touched it. Willie Mays never touched it. Hank Aaron — the home run king himself — never hit more than 47 in a season. The record felt like one of those things that simply would not, could not, be broken.
But by the spring of 1998, the ground had shifted. Mark McGwire had hit 58 home runs the year before — a number that would have been the record in any year before 1961, and one that announced, in unmistakable terms, that Maris was no longer safe. Ken Griffey Jr. had hit 56. The sport had spent three years recovering from the strike, and the medicine it prescribed was power — pure, raw, intoxicating power. The game was faster, the players bigger, the ballparks smaller, and the baseballs were wound tighter than they'd been in decades. Sports Illustrated put McGwire on its baseball preview cover with a headline that read, simply, "Get Ready for a Slugfest."
Nobody was arguing.
The Big Redwood and the Kid
Mark McGwire was a spectacle before he ever stepped into the batter's box. At 6-foot-5 and 250 pounds, with arms that looked sculpted from granite and a swing that started somewhere near the pitcher's mound before whipping through the zone with violent efficiency, he was the kind of player who made children drop their ice cream cones when he walked to the plate. He was 34 years old, in his prime, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals in a baseball-obsessed city that worshipped him like a deity. He was known, affectionately, as "Big Mac."
Ken Griffey Jr. — "The Kid" — was the other half of the preseason narrative. At 28, playing for the Seattle Mariners in the Kingdome's launching-pad confines, Griffey was the most complete player in baseball: a .300 hitter with 56-homer power, a Gold Glove center fielder, a smile that belonged on a cereal box. He was the star baseball wanted — clean, charismatic, universally beloved. If anyone was going to break 61, conventional wisdom said, it was Griffey.
Sammy Sosa wasn't in the conversation. The 29-year-old right fielder for the Chicago Cubs had shown flashes of power — 36 home runs in 1996, 36 more in 1997 — but he'd never hit 40, never finished higher than eighth in MVP voting, never been mentioned in the same breath as McGwire and Griffey. He was a good player on a mediocre team, a footnote waiting to happen. He was also, as the summer would reveal, the most dangerous dark horse in baseball history.
The Spring That Changed Everything
McGwire opened the season the way a sledgehammer opens a coconut. On Opening Day against the Los Angeles Dodgers, he crushed a grand slam off Ramón Martínez — a statement of intent fired across the bow of the National League. By the end of April, he had 11 home runs. Griffey had 11 too. Vinny Castilla, improbably, also had 11. The record was no longer a question of "if" — it was a question of "how many."
Sosa, meanwhile, was barely keeping pace. He finished April with six home runs, the same as several dozen other players. When May ended with McGwire at 27 homers and Sosa at 13 — less than half of Big Mac's total — the race looked like a coronation, not a competition. McGwire was on pace for 66. Sosa was on pace for 36. There was no story here.
And then June happened.
Slammin' Sammy's Monumental June
Something clicked inside Sammy Sosa that month, something that turned a good power hitter into a force of nature. On June 1, he hit two home runs. A few days later, he hit two more. The home runs kept coming — not in bunches but in avalanches, game after game, as if Sosa had made a private bargain with the baseball gods and they were collecting on the deal. On June 15, he hit his 20th homer of the month, breaking Rudy York's 61-year-old record for most home runs in a single month. By the time June ended, Sosa had 20 home runs in 30 days — a mark that still stands, a stretch of hitting so absurd it defies rational explanation.
The chase was no longer a coronation. It was a horse race.
Sosa entered July with 33 home runs, tied with Griffey, trailing McGwire by only four. And he brought something with him that McGwire didn't have — showmanship. After every home run, Sosa would round first base, hop, skip, and tap his heart twice before blowing a kiss to the sky, dedicating each blast to the late Harry Caray, the legendary Cubs broadcaster who had died that February. It was spontaneous, joyful, and utterly infectious. America couldn't look away.
The Summer of the Long Ball
The summer of 1998 became something the sport had never seen and hasn't seen since: a daily national event. Baseball wasn't just back — it was everywhere. Every McGwire at-bat was must-see television. Every Sosa swing was a potential headline. SportsCenter didn't just lead with the home run race; it built entire broadcasts around it. CNN cut into regular programming when McGwire was at the plate. Newsweek and Time — not Sports Illustrated, but the actual newsmagazines — put the sluggers on their covers. The home run chase had transcended sports and become American culture.
The numbers were staggering. On August 19, Sosa hit his 48th home run, temporarily tying McGwire at 48. The two sluggers spent the rest of the month trading the lead like prizefighters swapping body blows, each refusing to blink. By September 1, they were deadlocked at 55 — already within striking distance of Maris, with a full month left to play. For the first time in 37 years, the single-season home run record was not just in jeopardy — it was in imminent, unavoidable danger.
McGwire opened September with a fury, hitting four home runs in his first two games against the Florida Marlins. He was at 59. Sosa, momentarily staggered, answered with a barrage of his own, pulling even at 59. The nation held its breath.
September 8, 1998 — The Night History Came to Busch Stadium
The date is etched into baseball lore. September 8, 1998. Busch Stadium in St. Louis. A Monday night game between the Cardinals and the Chicago Cubs. McGwire sat at 61 home runs, having tied Maris the night before with a 430-foot moonshot off Mike Morgan. Now he needed one more to own the record outright.
The atmosphere inside Busch Stadium was electric — a tension that felt more like Game 7 of the World Series than a mid-September regular-season game. Fans held signs. Reporters clogged the press box. The Maris family — Roger's children — sat in the stands, having flown to St. Louis to witness history. And in right field, patrolling his position with the easy athleticism that had defined his improbable season, stood Sammy Sosa, chasing the same moment.
In the bottom of the fourth inning, with the Cubs leading 2-0, McGwire stepped to the plate against Cubs right-hander Steve Trachsel. The crowd rose as one, a wall of sound washing over the stadium. Trachsel's first pitch was a ball. His second — a fastball, middle-away — was not.
McGwire's swing is the stuff of slow-motion legend. The bat whipped through the zone with a sound like a gunshot, connecting with the ball somewhere around the letters. The baseball took off toward left field — not with the towering arc of a typical McGwire moonshot, but on a lower trajectory, carrying, carrying, carrying. It cleared the wall by maybe a foot, landing 341 feet from home plate. The shortest home run McGwire hit all season. The most important one he would ever hit.
Number 62.
The stadium erupted. McGwire rounded first base, his face a mask of controlled emotion that cracked into a wide, triumphant grin. Cubs first baseman Mark Grace met him on the basepath with a half-hug, a high-five, a moment of pure sportsmanship that captured everything the race was supposed to be. And then, as McGwire approached home plate, Sosa sprinted in from right field — a blur of blue and white — and wrapped him in a bear hug, lifting the bigger man off the ground. Two rivals, locked in the most intense competition in sports, embracing like brothers.
If the 1998 home run chase had a single defining image, that was it. Two men, at the peak of their powers, sharing a moment that transcended team loyalties and competitive fire. It was the summer's perfect punctuation mark — a moment so pure, so unscripted, that it felt like a movie.
McGwire's home run ball didn't even make it to the stands. It was caught by Tim Forneris, a 22-year-old grounds crew member who was also attending law school at Saint Louis University. Forneris, in a gesture of grace that became its own footnote to the night, declined multiple offers — some reportedly exceeding $1 million — to return the ball to McGwire. "It belongs to him," Forneris said. "He earned it."
The Final Reel: 70 and 66
The race wasn't over, though. McGwire went cold after breaking the record, going six games without a home run while Sosa caught fire, tying him again at 62, then 63, then 64. On September 25, the final Friday of the regular season, Sosa crushed a 462-foot bomb off José Lima for his 66th home run — briefly holding the single-season record all to himself. McGwire tied him that same night. The two men entered the final weekend tied at 65.
McGwire closed the season with the kind of flourish that belongs in a highlight reel of the gods. Facing the Montreal Expos at Busch Stadium, he hit two home runs on Saturday and two more on Sunday — five in his final three games, against five different pitchers. His 70th and final home run came off Carl Pavano, a 370-foot shot into the left-field bleachers that felt less like a baseball swing and more like a heavyweight champion raising his arms after fifteen rounds.
Seventy home runs. A number that had seemed as improbable as walking on the moon was suddenly, irrevocably, real.
Sosa finished with 66 — a total that would have shattered Maris's record by five home runs and would have been the single greatest power season in baseball history in any other year. Instead, it was the second-best, and Sosa won the National League MVP award anyway, finishing with a .308 average, 158 RBIs, and the kind of season that would have been the story of the decade if not for the man ahead of him.
The Asterisk That Ate Everything
The 1998 home run race didn't just save baseball. It made baseball the biggest show in America again. Attendance surged. Television ratings spiked. The sport that had been on life support four years earlier was suddenly the hottest ticket in the country. Mike Lupica wrote a book called "Summer of '98: When Homers Flew, Records Fell, and Baseball Reclaimed America." The title wasn't hyperbole. It was journalism.
But the summer's glow came with a shadow that would only grow darker with time. Both McGwire and Sosa were later tied to performance-enhancing drugs — McGwire's infamous androstenone use was an open secret even in 1998, and Sosa was named in leaked test results years later. When McGwire testified before Congress in 2005 and refused to discuss the past, the public turned on him. When the steroids-era report came out, both men were branded as symbols of the game's most embarrassing era. Neither has been elected to the Hall of Fame. Their records — 70 and 66 — have been passed by Barry Bonds, but the shadow of suspicion has never lifted.
And yet the summer of 1998 remains untouchable in the American imagination. It was the last great innocent sports spectacle before the cynicism of the steroid era fully set in — or perhaps it was never innocent at all, and we simply chose not to see. Either way, for one perfect season, two men with extraordinary gifts did something extraordinary together, and a country that had forgotten how to love baseball remembered.
The home run chase didn't just save the sport. It reminded us why we cared in the first place. And even now — with all the asterisks and the scandals and the complicated legacy — that summer still feels like magic.
Ryan Whitaker
Ryan Whitaker covers sports through a data-driven lens, using trends, matchups, and key numbers to turn complex information into useful takeaways.