Why Chip Caray feels the McGwire-Sosa home run chase is still 'magical'

The summer of 1998 was magical for baseball fans. The home run chase between St. Louis Cardinals slugger Mark McGwire and Chicago Cubs outfielder Sammy Sosa came out of nowhere. The division rivals went toe-to-toe throughout the summer for the home run crown.

Former Cubs announcer Chip Caray explained why that summer was so magical to him while appearing on the Audacy Original Podcast “PBP: The Voices of Baseball” this week.

“That was spectacular because it was just so unexpected,” Caray said. “If you remember, ‘94 was awful. Our sport in its own inimitable way to self-destruct tried to destroy itself over greed on both sides and people were pissed. They were still angry. They weren’t coming out. They were not coming out in ‘95, in ‘96, in ‘97.”

The 1994 strike left a bitter taste in fans’ mouths, and they showed that through their wallets. The home run chase in 1998 brought fans back to the game that they loved.

“Attendance was down. Whatever Machiavellian subterfuge you think took place, ‘98 did take place. McGwire and Sosa,” Caray continued. “A man from the Dominican Republic and a guy from Southern California playing in baseball’s heartland going toe-to-toe for six months with this unbelievable out-of-nowhere home run chase was wonderful TV.

“Sammy would hit one on WGN at 3 o’clock; McGwire would hit two in San Francisco later that night. And back and forth we went. When you saw the reaction of the fan base, baseball was giving the fans what they wanted. They wanted to see this. They wanted excitement. They wanted a race within the race.”

The love for baseball was back in not only Chicago and St. Louis, but across the country as well.

“When you’d go out and look at Waveland Avenue you’d see 5,000 people trying to catch batting practice balls and they’re standing down Kenmore Avenue where Dave Kingman used to hit them to try to catch these souvenirs you knew this was something remarkable,” said Caray/ “When we traveled we get into town at 3 o’clock in the morning to Houston to go play the Astros and there’d be 150 people outside the hotel trying to get autographs at two in the morning. It really was a spectacular thing. To have a front row seat to the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin playing in concert every night was an unbelievable treat.”

The home run chase brought fans back to the sport and helped create the next generation of fans.

“It was great for the sport. It was so healing at the time. It was so important,” Caray continued. “and it really turned on an entire generation of fans because to this day I get people all the time ‘When I was a kid I grew up watching you and I saw the Sosa-McGwire home run chase on WGN. I’ll never forget those calls that you and Steve had.’ That’s really rewarding for me, but also rewarding for the sport because that’s our job. We want to turn people on and create the next generation of fans who fall in love with the sport the way we did back in the ‘60s and ‘70s.”

Of course, the ‘98 home run chase – and the years that followed – now have the dark cloud of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs looming over it. There may have been rumors in 1998, but nothing was known for sure.

“I was naive. I was 33. I didn’t understand what was going on; I was kind of new to the baseball thing. I didn’t think about steroids or HGH or any of this stuff,” Caray said. “I didn’t know. There were whispers but nobody could prove it.

“Do I wish that that part of it had not happened in our game? Not just the suspicions around those two but other people in the sport? Of course we do. But we don’t have the luxury of that. So the choice is you can either cast incredible doubt on it or you can call the moment for what it was. And I prefer to do it that way.”

Caray’s job wasn’t to figure out if there were any nefarious happenings around the team or league. He did his job as the voice of the Cubs during the electric summer of ‘98.

“I’m really proud of the work that we did collectively as an announce team, and quite frankly our job isn’t to be investigative journalists. That’s for other people to do. It wouldn’t be right for us to cast dispersions on people without facts,” he said. “In fact, that’d probably be libelous.

“We knew what we knew. We did what we did. We saw what we saw and we described it. In and of itself, exclusive of all the other things that we now know with the hindsight of 26 or 27 years, it really was magical the summer of ‘98, for me.”