Long Gone Summer (TV)
I remember falling asleep while listening to the radio broadcasts of Atlanta Braves games starting in that 1991 “Worst-to-First” baseball season. I really started to pay attention to baseball in the 1990s in a way I haven’t at any other point in my life. Yes, I remember the race to 61 between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa during the 1998 season. It was one of the few times I really paid attention to anything baseball related that had nothing to do with the Braves and the Cleveland Indians. And it was a ton of fun.
AJ Schnack’s “Long Gone Summer” details the race to beat Roger Maris’s single season home run record for the “30 for 30” series in a way that brings full context to the race, and what it meant to the sport. At the time, it didn’t really resonate with me how much it meant for baseball, whose popularity had taken a hit after the 1994 strike, which led to the first cancelled World Series in history. It was a moment where baseball’s popularity was waning, and Major League Baseball needed a shot in the arm. The time was right for this moment, for one of the most momentous records in sports to fall. Schnack’s film puts that excitement front-and-center, as we listen to the story told by the two men at the center of it all.
I’m honestly conflicted about the last 15-20 minutes of this film. Of course, any film that discusses this home run race should address the steroids controversy that has now clouded that amazing summer for the sport, but it leaves us feeling down about everything we’d seen before. Maybe the film should just have focused on the that magical summer, and the race for history. That would be as inauthentic as the records that came out of it, however; still, seeing the way Sosa and the Cubs have been at odds, and seeing how little time lapsed until the summer became a footnote due to the controversial run of Barry Bonds after the fact, it doesn’t take a lot to really put a damper on this summer.
All that being said, Schnack does a terrific job of telling the story of this run, and letting McGwire and Sosa give us a glimpse of their mindsets going through that season is one of the strongest elements of the film. There is plenty of broadcaster content throughout the film, but it’s the men at the center of the race- as well as the son of whom they were chasing for history- who give this the gravity of something important, even if history has shown that it is a tainted memory.
