Bonds, McGwire, and the Summer of '98

The 1994 strike had cancelled the World Series, emptied stadiums, and broken the bond between baseball and a generation of its audience. Average attendance fell nearly 20 percent in 1995. Television ratings remained depressed. The cultural position baseball had held for over a century was bleeding out to the NFL and the NBA, two leagues that had not cancelled their championships and antagonized their fans. By 1998, baseball needed a spectacle large enough to make people forget what the sport had done to itself. Two enormous men swinging for the fences provided one.

Mark McGwire of the St. Louis Cardinals and Sammy Sosa of the Chicago Cubs spent the summer of 1998 chasing Roger Maris's single-season home run record of 61, set in 1961. The chase dominated nightly news broadcasts, ran on front pages across the country, and gave the sport a storyline so compelling that even casual fans started tracking the count. It worked. Baseball returned to the center of American sports conversation. What nobody discussed, or what everybody chose not to discuss, was how two hitters had gotten so much bigger and so much more powerful in so little time.

A Bigger Mark McGwire

McGwire had been a prodigious power hitter from the start. In his 1987 rookie season with the Oakland Athletics, he hit 49 home runs and won the American League Rookie of the Year award. That 49-homer total set the major league rookie record, one that held until Aaron Judge hit 52 for the Yankees in 2017. McGwire stood six-foot-five and was listed at 215 pounds on Baseball-Reference, though his frame suggested he carried more weight than that even as a young player. He hit the ball harder and farther than nearly anyone in the game.

But injuries hollowed out the early 1990s. McGwire played fewer than 100 games in 1993, 1994, and 1995. His body broke down repeatedly, and his career seemed to be winding toward an early end. Then the body changed. By 1996, McGwire was visibly bigger, with thickened forearms and a wider neck. He hit 52 home runs in only 130 games that season, becoming the first player to reach 50 in fewer than 140 games. In 1997, the Athletics traded him to St. Louis on July 31. He had already hit 34 home runs in Oakland and added 24 more in 51 games as a Cardinal, finishing the year with 58. The power numbers were not just elite. They were unprecedented for a player entering his mid-thirties.

The Transformation of Sammy Sosa

Sosa's physical arc was even more striking. The Texas Rangers signed him out of the Dominican Republic in 1985, when he was sixteen years old, for $3,500. He arrived in the major leagues as a skinny, free-swinging outfielder with speed, a strong arm, and a plate approach that produced as many strikeouts as hits. He bounced from the Rangers to the White Sox to the Cubs, and through his first several seasons he was a tools player whose discipline at the plate lagged behind his physical gifts.

In 1993, Sosa hit 33 home runs, the first time he had cleared 30. He became the Cubs' first 30-30 player that season, combining 33 home runs with 36 stolen bases. But the Sosa of 1993 bore little physical resemblance to the Sosa of 1998. His listed weight climbed from around 170 pounds to 220. The change showed in his shoulders, arms, and chest. By 1998 he had become a different kind of hitter, built to drive the ball out of the park rather than to beat out infield singles. He would hit 66 home runs that year.

Neither player was tested for performance-enhancing drugs. Major League Baseball had no steroid testing program in 1998. The sport's drug policy addressed recreational drugs and, in theory, amphetamines, though even amphetamine use was widespread and largely ignored. Steroids and human growth hormone fell outside the policy entirely. Players could use whatever they wanted, and many of them did.

The Chase

The race took shape in June. McGwire had hit 16 home runs in May, putting him ahead of the pace needed to catch Maris. Then Sosa erupted. He hit 20 home runs in June 1998, a single-month record that still stands. In the span of four weeks, Sosa went from an afterthought in the home run conversation to McGwire's primary rival. By the All-Star break in early July, McGwire had 37 home runs and Sosa had 33. The question was no longer whether the record would fall. It was which of them would break it first.

The relationship between the two players gave the chase its emotional appeal. McGwire was reserved, intense, and uncomfortable with the attention. Sosa was exuberant, bilingual, and delighted to be in the spotlight. He called McGwire "my friend Mark" in press conferences, sprinted out of the dugout to congratulate him on home runs, and treated the competition as a shared celebration rather than a personal rivalry. There was no visible hostility, no manufactured feud. The warmth between them made the story more appealing to a public that was tired of athletes behaving badly.

Through late August and early September, the two traded the lead back and forth. On September 8, the Cardinals hosted the Cubs at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. McGwire came to the plate in the fourth inning against Cubs pitcher Steve Trachsel with 61 home runs, tied with Maris. He jumped on the first pitch and hit a line drive that barely cleared the left-field wall, traveling 341 feet, the shortest home run of his season. He was the new single-season record holder.

The celebration was prolonged and emotional. McGwire lifted his ten-year-old son Matt, who was working as the Cardinals' batboy, high into the air. He ran to the first row of seats near the dugout and embraced the children of Roger Maris, who had died of lymphoma on December 14, 1985. He pointed to the sky. Sosa ran in from right field and hugged him. The stadium shook. For one night, baseball felt like the most important thing in the country.

McGwire finished the 1998 season with 70 home runs. Sosa finished with 66. Both men had obliterated a record that had stood for 37 years, a record whose pursuit had caused Maris so much stress that his hair fell out during the 1961 season. McGwire and Sosa appeared to handle the pressure with more ease, though the pressures they carried were different in kind.

The Bottle in the Locker

During the summer of 1998, an Associated Press reporter named Steve Wilstein noticed a brown bottle of androstenedione sitting on the top shelf of McGwire's locker. Androstenedione was an over-the-counter supplement at the time, a testosterone precursor that was legal under federal law but banned by the NFL, the NCAA, and the International Olympic Committee. Major League Baseball had not banned it.

Wilstein reported what he saw. The reaction from the baseball establishment was aimed not at McGwire but at Wilstein. Cardinals manager Tony La Russa accused the reporter of snooping. Other writers criticized him for endangering the feel-good narrative. Commissioner Bud Selig said he would look into the issue. He did not look into the issue.

The androstenedione disclosure was a signal the sport refused to receive. Androstenedione was not an anabolic steroid, but its presence in a player's locker raised obvious questions about what else might be in that locker or in that player's body. Those questions went unasked by the league, the media covering the chase, and the fans who were filling stadiums for the first time since the strike. The owners were selling tickets. The networks were selling ads. The players were getting paid. Everyone had reasons to look away.

Baseball's complicity in the steroid era was not passive ignorance. It was an active decision to avoid information that would disrupt a recovery narrative. The sport had nearly destroyed itself in 1994. The home run chase was putting it back together. Nobody in a position of authority wanted to ask the question that would unravel the comeback.

Barry Bonds Decides

Barry Bonds watched the 1998 home run chase from San Francisco, where he played left field for the Giants and put up numbers that would have dominated any other era. Bonds hit .303 with 37 home runs and 122 RBIs in 1998, his thirteenth consecutive elite season. He had already won three MVP awards (1990, 1992, 1993). He was widely considered the best all-around player of his generation, a combination of power, speed, plate discipline, and defensive ability that only a handful of players in history had matched.

But McGwire and Sosa got the attention, the adulation, the Sports Illustrated covers, the nightly highlights. Bonds was a better baseball player than either of them by any reasonable measure, and he was being treated as an afterthought while two sluggers, at least one of whom he suspected of using performance-enhancing drugs, broke records and received standing ovations.

According to Game of Shadows, the investigative book by San Francisco Chronicle reporters Mark Fainaru-Wada and Lance Williams, Bonds made a decision after the 1998 season. If the game was going to reward this kind of performance, and if the sport was going to look the other way, then he would do it better than anyone. Bonds began working with Greg Anderson, a personal trainer with connections to the Bay Area Laboratory Co-Operative, known as BALCO. Anderson and BALCO founder Victor Conte supplied Bonds with a regimen of performance-enhancing substances that reportedly included human growth hormone, testosterone, and "the Clear," a designer steroid called tetrahydrogestrinone (THG) that was undetectable by existing drug tests.

The 73-Homer Season and Four Straight MVPs

The results were immediate and staggering. Bonds had always been lean and fast, listed at 185 pounds for most of his career on Baseball-Reference. By 2001, he had put on substantial weight, and his body looked nothing like the player the Pirates had drafted sixth overall in 1985. At age 36, when most players are declining, Bonds produced the greatest offensive season in baseball history. He hit 73 home runs, breaking McGwire's three-year-old record. He walked 177 times, 35 of them intentionally. His slugging percentage was .863. His OPS was 1.379.

Bonds won the National League MVP award in 2001, 2002, 2003, and 2004, four consecutive seasons, something no player had ever done. In 2004, at age 39, he hit .362 with a .609 on-base percentage, the highest single-season OBP in modern baseball history. He walked 232 times that year, 120 of them intentionally. He had more times on base (376) than official at-bats (373), a statistical impossibility turned real. Pitchers would rather put him on first base with nobody out than throw him a strike. He was the most feared hitter anyone in the sport had ever seen, and the production justified the fear.

756

On August 7, 2007, Bonds hit his 756th career home run off Mike Bacsik of the Washington Nationals at AT&T Park in San Francisco, passing Hank Aaron as the all-time home run leader. Aaron had broken Babe Ruth's record on April 8, 1974, hitting his 715th homer off Al Downing of the Dodgers and eventually retiring in 1976 with 755. When Aaron passed Ruth, the achievement was treated as a national moment, complicated by the racism Aaron endured during the chase but celebrated for its legitimacy. When Bonds passed Aaron, Commissioner Bud Selig was in the stadium. He did not applaud.

The record that should have been the crowning achievement of a career was instead the most contested number in American sports history. The ball was caught by a fan and later sold at auction. The celebration was muted compared to what Aaron had received 33 years earlier.

The Federal Investigation

The unraveling began before Bonds reached 756. On September 3, 2003, federal investigators from the IRS, the FDA, and the San Mateo County Narcotics Task Force raided BALCO's laboratory in Burlingame, California, and seized records connecting dozens of athletes to performance-enhancing drug use. The BALCO investigation was a federal criminal case targeting illegal drug distribution, not a baseball inquiry, but baseball players were caught in its net.

Bonds testified before a federal grand jury on December 4, 2003. His testimony, later leaked to the San Francisco Chronicle and eventually made public, included his claim that he had used substances provided by Anderson but believed they were flaxseed oil and arthritis cream. The grand jury testimony became a defining document of the steroid era, not because it was persuasive but because it demonstrated the lengths to which players would go to avoid acknowledging what they had done.

Congress Gets Involved

McGwire's reckoning came on March 17, 2005, when he appeared before the House Committee on Government Reform alongside Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, and Curt Schilling. The hearing was a spectacle.

Sosa, who had spent his career as one of the most voluble and charismatic players in the game, brought a translator and gave evasive answers. The decision drew scrutiny because Sosa had conducted English-language interviews for years. Palmeiro pointed his finger at the committee and declared, "I have never used steroids. Period." He tested positive for stanozolol, a powerful anabolic steroid, several months later. McGwire, looking uncomfortable and near tears, repeated a single phrase throughout his testimony. "I'm not here to talk about the past." He refused to deny using steroids. He refused to confirm it. He offered nothing.

The hearing accomplished little legislatively, but it destroyed McGwire's public standing overnight. A player who had been celebrated as a national hero in 1998 became a symbol of evasion. His Hall of Fame candidacy, which should have been straightforward given his 583 career home runs and his single-season record, collapsed. He received 23.5 percent of the vote in his first year on the ballot in 2007, far short of the 75 percent required for induction. He never came close in ten years of eligibility.

The Mitchell Report

On December 13, 2007, former United States Senator George Mitchell released his report to the Commissioner of Baseball on the illegal use of steroids and other performance-enhancing substances by major league players. The document was 409 pages long and named 89 players, including Roger Clemens, Andy Pettitte, Miguel Tejada, and dozens of others. The investigation relied heavily on two witnesses. Kirk Radomski, a former New York Mets clubhouse attendant who had distributed steroids and human growth hormone to players, provided names, dates, and financial records. Brian McNamee, a personal trainer who had injected Roger Clemens with steroids and HGH, provided testimony that formed the basis of the report's most incendiary allegations.

The Mitchell Report confirmed what reporters and many fans had suspected for years. Steroid use in baseball was not limited to a few high-profile sluggers. It was widespread, spanning both leagues, touching pitchers and position players, stars and journeymen alike. The report recommended more rigorous testing, increased penalties, and investigation of the distribution networks that had supplied players with drugs.

The Clemens Saga

The immediate aftermath of the Mitchell Report was a cycle of denials, accusations, and more congressional hearings. Roger Clemens held a press conference denying everything in the report. He then testified before Congress in February 2008 in a contentious hearing during which he and McNamee gave directly contradictory accounts of the same events. Clemens insisted he had never used steroids or human growth hormone. McNamee insisted he had injected Clemens with both.

Clemens was later indicted on two counts of perjury, three counts of making false statements, and one count of obstruction of Congress. The first trial ended in a mistrial. The retrial in 2012 ended with Clemens acquitted on all six counts after the jury deliberated for less than ten hours. The acquittal did not restore his reputation. It demonstrated only that the government could not prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he had lied, a standard different from the one applied by baseball writers and fans.

The Record Book and the Hall of Fame

The steroid era left baseball with a problem it has no clean way to resolve. The sport's identity is built on its records more than any other professional league. Baseball fans know that Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs in 1927, that Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games, that Hank Aaron held the career home run record for 33 years. Those numbers carry weight because they allow comparisons across generations. The steroid era broke that chain.

Barry Bonds holds the career home run record with 762. He holds the single-season record with 73. He holds the single-season records for walks (232) and intentional walks (120) and on-base percentage (.609). Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs in a season. Sammy Sosa hit 60 or more three times (66 in 1998, 63 in 1999, 64 in 2001), something no other player has done even once. These numbers are in the official record book, and MLB has never placed an asterisk next to any of them.

The Hall of Fame became the primary battleground. The Baseball Writers' Association of America, which votes on induction, split into factions. Some writers voted on the basis of on-field performance regardless of suspected PED use. Others refused to vote for anyone connected to steroids. The result was that Bonds, Clemens, Sosa, and McGwire all failed to gain induction through the writers' vote during their ten years of eligibility.

Bonds received 66 percent of the vote in his final year on the BBWAA ballot in 2022, nine percentage points short of the 75 percent threshold. Clemens received 65.2 percent. Both were rejected despite credentials that, absent the steroid cloud, would have made them first-ballot selections. Bonds is a seven-time MVP. Clemens is a seven-time Cy Young Award winner. Neither is in the Hall of Fame.

The Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, the special panel that considers players not elected by the writers, voted in December 2025. Jeff Kent was elected. Bonds and Clemens each received fewer than five votes from the sixteen-member panel. Under a rule change announced by the Hall earlier that year, candidates receiving fewer than five committee votes cannot appear on the next cycle's ballot. Bonds and Clemens will not be eligible for the committee ballot again until 2031 at the earliest. If they fail to reach five votes again, they will be permanently barred from future consideration under the current rules.

As of 2026, the all-time home run leader, the greatest power hitter in baseball history by most statistical measures, is not in the Hall of Fame. The sport has chosen to treat steroid-era stars as a category of player too accomplished to ignore and too tainted to honor.

What the Steroid Era Changed

The lasting effect of the steroid era on baseball is the fracture in trust between the sport and its audience.

Baseball had always operated on an implicit agreement with its fans. The records were legitimate. The numbers connected the present to the past. When Hank Aaron passed Babe Ruth, it was because Aaron had spent 23 seasons accumulating home runs through persistence and consistency. When Aaron's record fell to Bonds, the achievement carried a different weight, and everyone in the stadium and watching at home understood the difference.

The drug testing program that baseball eventually adopted, starting with anonymous survey testing in 2003 and escalating to mandatory testing with suspensions by 2005, was a response to public pressure rather than internal conviction. The owners had tolerated steroids because the home runs filled seats. The players' union had resisted testing because it viewed mandatory drug testing as a violation of collective bargaining rights. Both sides were complicit, and both sides moved only when the political and commercial costs of inaction exceeded the costs of reform.

The survey testing in 2003 revealed that between five and seven percent of major leaguers tested positive for performance-enhancing substances, a rate high enough to trigger the next phase of the program. Mandatory testing with escalating penalties followed. Home run rates declined from their steroid-era peaks. League-wide batting averages dropped. Whether the decline reflected cleaner play or a shift in the substances being used is a question the testing program cannot fully answer, though the overall trend suggests that removing the most potent anabolic agents from the sport had a real effect on offensive production.

The summer of 1998 was, by almost every account, the most exciting home run chase in baseball history. It brought the sport back from its lowest point. It gave fans a reason to care again. And it was built on a foundation the sport spent the next two decades trying to explain away. McGwire and Sosa rescued baseball, and the cost of that rescue was a generation of records that nobody can trust completely.