Long Gone Summer

I loved it. Took me back to the glory days. I am a HUGE Sammy Sosa fan and I enjoyed it. Sad Sammy and Mark have become the face of the steriod era. Hard to say who was, who wasn't. Both should be in the HOF, esp when there was no testing and they weren't illegal until they were.

I enjoyed this documentary. I will admit, at about 30 minutes in, I was wondering/worried if they were going to avoid talking about McGwire and Sosa's use of steroids. Long story short, they do, but only in the last 15 minutes, which several other reviewers have a problem with. Personally, I thought it was handled well enough and both McGwire and Sosa both discussed it in their interviews for this film. But this film is not about steroids in Baseball. It's about reliving a period in America's Favorite Pasttime - the home run race between two National League players, who couldn't be more opposite (even to this day - McGwire has admitted to using 'roids, while Sosa still denies it) - and during a time when it was needed most, soon after the 1994 strikes. I didn't find this documentary boring at all. It's a fun ride.

I watched this 2020 episode for the first time via ESPN+ in 2024. Like the unspoken nepotism the Lakers drafting of Bronny James, we all suspected that the sudden increase in home runs in the 1990s was from juicing.

I enjoyed reliving the nostalgic story and would have given it a higher rating if not for a couple of things:

1) a shot of a "Black Lives Matter" sign purportedly from 1998? Nah, that phrase wasn't coined until 2013 by Alicia Garza.

2) the music by the Tweedy brothers. I suspect those out-of-tune electric guitars were trying to make a subliminal statement about the story tainted by steroids, but I almost put the last several minutes on mute because I couldn't stand listening to them.

I don't believe that the use of "chemistry" to enhance athletic performance is an unforgiveable sin for being voted into the MLB Hall of Fame. 100+ years ago, gifted Olympic athletes complained when their sub-par competitors started exercise routines to improve their performance.

How do you do a documentary on this summer and ignore steroids. Honestly a complete waste of time. And what is worse it just puts them up on a pedestal. If everyone was doing them, that is fine. Let's at least talk about it. Don't make a documentary and tall half the story. It was incredibly disappointing.