The Sosa McGwire Doc 'Long Gone Summer' Arrives This Sunday Night And It Looks Fucking Awesome
(Little more extended look)
The Last Dance was appointment television for me. I treated it, like many of you did, as if I was watching a playoff game. I'd be walking my dog at 6:00 realizing 9:00 was just a few hours away where I could sit down and just be mesmerized for 120 minutes. 5 straight weeks of that helped save my sanity as I was deprived of live sports. That's the same kind of feeling I get with 'Long Gone Summer' and I'm genuinely so excited for Sunday to get here. We just need things to look forward to and get us to the end of July (unless baseball wants to pull its head out of its ass and get going).
The home run chase of '98 was just what baseball needed at the time. They still weren't recovered from the '94 strike and had trouble getting fans in the ballparks. This shit sparked popularity and eyeballs across the country. They would cut into other events and programming to give you an update on who had just hit another homer as if it were national news about the President. They wouldn't dare do that with baseball these days. It's sadly unimaginable that would happen with today's game. That's how good the steroid era was and why I believe they should just bring it back and legalize juicing. You cannot deny that baseball in its greatest form.
At this point who the hell knows if baseball is actually going to happen this year. I think it will under some fucked up 50 game format, unless the owners budge, but either way it'll be under a dark cloud as money got in the way of a fun opportunity. Every time we get bleaker and bleaker news about the upcoming season I remind myself that baseball needed THE STEROID ERA to revive itself after sitting out a season. There's no steroid era coming to save you this time. You sit out this year while every other sport comes back and you potentially could kill the sport. Idiots.
At least we're getting two hours on Sunday night detailing the chase for Maris and reliving the glory days of baseball. I wish this was a multi-episode doc, but I'll take what I can get. Get me to Sunday at 8:00.
P.S. How about Costas at the end trying to sound all dramatic with his "there was a price to pay for it?" Reminds me of maybe the most preposterous commentary ever during a random June Cubs game where he murdered Pedro Stropp in cold blood.