In 1998, Mark McGwire hit 70 home runs and Sammy Sosa clubbed 66. McGwire looked like a bipedal Clydesdale swinging an elm tree; he was (somehow) far stronger at the age of thirty-five than he had been ten years before. Sosa was only thirty in ’98, which seemed slightly more reasonable; of course, he happened to be a thirty-year-old man with acne, so that was a little weird. But people loved these jovial manimals, and people wanted to see (the never beloved) Roger Maris erased from the record books, and people casually wondered if maybe there was something wrong with the actual baseballs.
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