ESPN’s ‘Long Gone Summer’ Recalls Magical Home Run Chase With A Dose Of Hindsight, Says Director

Growing up in Edwardsville, IL, AJ Schnack lived in a house divided. Some family members were St. Louis Cardinals fans, while others favored the Chicago Cubs. As such, the summer of 1998 was an exciting time in his household. 

When ESPN reached out to Schnack about producing and directing an installment of their popular 30 for 30 documentary series, Schnack, who incidentally falls into the Cardinals camp, knew immediately the topic he wanted to tackle. 

Schack’s film, Long Gone Summer, follows the battle between the Cardinals Mark McGwire and the Cubs Sammy Sosa as each sought to break the single season home run record. 

When the project began in 2017, the first challenge was to get all of the important parties to agree to talk on camera, especially the two men at the center of the story. 

“I always say that when you’re wanting to make a film about someone’s life, I’m asking them to turn over their memories to me,” explains Schnack. 

In addition to speaking with both McGwire and Sosa for hours, Schnack also sat down with  team managers, reporters, announcers, and front office personnel, among others; over forty people in all. 

“We worked really hard to get all of the key players who were there that summer, who were eyewitnesses to all of it, to talk about what it felt like every day of the chase,” says Schnack. “Our main goal was to put the viewer back in the middle of the excitement and the emotion of that time.”

Schnack says that even though he paid close attention during the summer of ‘98, in making the film he discovered that there were a few things that didn’t exactly happen as he remembered. “When I was doing research and interviews, I found out that I’d forgotten things or things didn’t happen in the order that I thought they did.” 

Giving an example, he explains, “I totally forgot that for a few innings on that one day in August, Sammy actually passed Mark. He hit a homer a few innings before Mark did that put him ahead in the chase.”

But Schnack wasn’t alone in this, he found. “When I showed Mark a rough cut of the film, he’d forgotten that too.”

In his ‘faulty recollection,’ as he calls it, Schnack says that he also erroneously thought McGwire was always a few home runs ahead of Sosa with Sosa sort of ‘crashing into the mix that last weekend.’  

It was in putting the film together that Schack realized that the battle between the two men was a lot closer than that, with the two men trading the lead often. 

The trajectory of the Cubs team that year also added to the narrative, says Schnack. “They started that season with the death of their loved longtime broadcaster Harry Carrey, and the previous season they had started off just miserably. Then in ‘98, they had Sammy in this chase, and they were in a pennant race as well, ultimately making it to the playoffs. So that was a great story to layer into this as well.”

The film doesn’t just shine on and on about those glory days without an adequate amount of reflection about what is now known about the use of performance enhancing substances during that time. 

“I think through the rest of the ‘90s and maybe a bit into 2001, people were still basking in the glow of all of the home runs. I think when [Barry] Bonds started [hitting] in 2001 that’s when I started really hearing people talk about PEDs,” says Schnack. “Prior to that, it feels like baseball didn’t really pay attention to what was going. The fans and the writers certainly weren’t paying that close attention to it. I think it was something that we were all seeing with our own eyes and  choosing not to pay attention to.”

Now, with hindsight in play, Schack feels that, “I think we have to just be honest about the fact that throughout baseball they’re have always been things that weren’t super righteous. There have been all kinds of things that people have taken throughout the years, amphetamines, for example. I think the sooner we come to the realization that we all played a little bit of a part of that denial then maybe we can look at it with a little bit less judgement.”

Speaking of judgement, Schnack is aware that sports fans are a notoriously critical group and may express some strong feelings about his work. “Sports are hot take central, for sure. There are so many angles to this – McGwire versus Sosa, the role of steroids in the game, Cubs versus Cardinals. I mean, sure, there are going to be some discussions and arguments, but the hope is that people will have learned a little bit or are reminded of what was going on, not just how they perceived it that season, as well as that era in baseball.”

By portraying the magic of that summer, coupled with some examination that takes into consideration what is known today, Schnack believes that viewers will see that it was not just something that was significant for baseball, but that it was a cultural moment as well, one that dominated conversation at the time. 

He also hopes that the film reminds viewers of just what a truly unique time it was in terms of unity. “We haven’t really seen anything like it in baseball since. We get excited about things like the Olympics, and Tiger Woods making a comeback, or a team like the Red Sox winning after decades of drought, but I don’t know that we’ll have this kind of a moment again, especially now as we become more distracted by the various sources of things that pull focus. It was a time when the country stopped and watched and we were all celebrating it together.”

Right now, in this moment, Schnack suspects that he’s simply feeling what legions of other baseball fans are feeling. “Well, I think we’d all love to be in the same place; at the ballpark, taking in a game.”

‘Long Gone Summer’ airs Sunday at 9e/8c on ESPN.