Stream It Or Skip It: ‘30 for 30: Long Gone Summer’ on ESPN, a Glossy Chronicle of the Mark McGwire-Sammy Sosa Home Run Chase (with Steroids)

ESPN’s new 30 for 30 documentary tips its hand with the title: Long Gone Summer tonally skews towards nostalgia. Director AJ Schnack chronicles the storied home run chase of 1998, when Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa drilled baseball after baseball to Uranus, zooming neck-and-neck past Roger Maris’ record of 61 homers, set in 1961. We all know how that story ended, though — polluted by the steroid scandal. Maybe Long Gone Summer should’ve been titled The Asterisk.

30 FOR 30: LONG GONE SUMMER: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Todd McFarlane is a famous comic book artist and entrepreneur with a lot of money: he paid $3 million at auction for Mark McGwire’s 70th home run ball. Long Gone Summer doesn’t say when he bought it, whether it was before or after McGwire admitted to using steroids when he obliterated Maris’ record in 1998, or if he regrets buying it, or if it’s still that valuable, or if he would resell it if he could, or if he keeps it because it’s party of sports history, infamous or otherwise. Schnack doesn’t ask those questions. McFarlane just talks about how a baseball like that puts the person who fetched it, caught it, fought for it in the stands “in the middle of that story.”

Sound flimsy and insubstantial? Get used to it.

The film continues: McGwire was a SoCal kid who used to be skinny, and yet he still managed to set the rookie home run record while with the Oakland A’s in 1987. In 1997, he looked like a barrel with Popeye’s arms sticking out of holes in the sides, and was traded to the St. Louis Cardinals during a particularly lousy slump. Yet he got a standing ovation during his first at-bats at Busch Stadium, because St. Louis fans are bananas for baseball, possibly the most bananas of any baseball fans, and they appreciated his tendency to hit balls so hard and so far, he nearly invented nuclear fusion. A talking head even comments on how he had weird and unnatural muscles sticking out of weird and unnatural places.

Sammy Sosa also was a baseball player. He’s from the Dominican Republic, where he used to be a shoeshine boy, but he ended up being a superstar for the lowly Chicago Cubs. He wasn’t supposed to be in this story — everyone thought McGwire and Ken Griffey Jr. would be going at it for the HR crown that season, but Griffey didn’t look like the Michelin Man, and his dinger tally dwindled down the stretch. Meanwhile, a reporter spotted some supplements in McGwire’s locker but the story blows over pretty quick because everyone was using supplements and they weren’t not not illegal anyway, at least in baseball, but more importantly, Puffy Sosa and McGwire kept cranking ’em into early September. This is when THE BASEBALL GODS’ holy sportsball plans came to fruition: the Cubs and Cards were scheduled for a two-game series in St. Louis, when Sosa was at 58 and McGwire was at 60, and everyone in America, living or dead, turned on their TV sets to see if McGwire would tie Maris’ record.

He did, and grown men wept hot salty tears. They kept going, too, McGwire to 70, Sosa to 66. They shared press conferences and TV interviews; they were pals AND rivals, because baseball is about more than just winning and losing — it’s about love.

Oh, and by the way, the steroid controversy nearly ruined it all, and it kinda sucked.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Didn’t we just see the legacy-ruined-by-juicing narrative a couple weeks back with Lance? At least Lance Armstrong’s 30 for 30 seemed a lot less like access journalism.

Performance Worth Watching: Bob Costas is the guy who cuts through the gauze and says what needs to be said. He’s in the movie about three times.

Memorable Dialogue: “People didn’t want to see the record broken, they wanted someone who was worthy.” — ESPN reporter TJ Quinn loads his commentary with dynamite early in the film, and it doesn’t explode for more than an hour.

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: “In retrospect, there was a price to pay for it,” Costas says, about 90 minutes into the 103-minute film. McGwire says what he said in 2010: He used steroids, but it was just to help with injuries, and he regrets it; cue the Hall of Fame indoctrination footage. Sosa is slippery and dodges the question, as he always has; he says he’s happy and his family is great, and he doesn’t care if he gets into the Hall or not. Schnack puts a few tidbits of trivia and insight in the film we maybe haven’t heard before, but the important, hard-journalist stuff comprises none of it.

Rather, the film implies that this extraordinary race to home run heaven did more for the GLORY of BASEBALL in the long run. It captured everyone’s attention and made them forget about the 1994 strike that scuttled the World Series and rendered the fans disillusioned. The subsequent decades, though? Gray areas. That’s life. Let’s be happy in our nostalgia bath!

Only Costas throws a hardball, saying Sosa and McGwire’s accomplishments (and steroid-amped Barry Bonds’ 73-homer season in 2001) were within the strict rules of the game, but are morally “inauthentic.” Does Schnack mention that the supplements McGwire was called out for using in 1998 were banned by the NFL, Olympics and the World Anti-Doping Agency? Nope. Had to Wikipedia that one. How does key interview subject Roger Maris Jr. feel about the steroid thing? Disappointed, if you Google an old article about McGwire’s confession, but not if you watch this movie. (Maris never got in the Hall of Fame, by the way, and many consider his record questionable because he beat Babe Ruth after the league added eight games to the season.)

To be fair, Long Gone Summer is a thoroughly professionally assembled collection of mostly warm feelings, as long as we choose to ignore how those warm feelings are tainted now. If you want to see highlight reels of home runs, you’ve fired up the right doc: Of the 134 homers Sosa and McGwire kablasted that year, we get to see roughly 175 of them, because Schnack shows some of them twice. It’s not at all repetitive!

Our Call: SKIP IT. Long Gone Summer is one of the more disappointing entries in the otherwise consistently excellent 30 for 30 series.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream 30 for 30 on ESPN+